Quotes About Progress

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

Her life, she knew, was becoming simplified into an unbreakable chain of habits, a series of orderly actions at regular hours. Vaguely, she thought of herself as a happy woman; yet she was aware that this monotony of contentment had no relation to what she had called happiness in her youth. It was better perhaps; it was certainly as good; but it measured all the difference between youth and maturity.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

They will never again build like this, he thought. Dignity is an anachronism.

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential.

There's a trick to the 'graceful exit.' It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over — and let it go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out.

We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives...not looking for flaws, but for potential.

Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.

We simply don't know, which is why scientific research is an almost constant search for better truths and not "the truth.

It may be in our best interest to proceed as though these and other abilities might be improved upon, so that at least we will not be deterred by false limits.

When we are first learning to do anything, we ought to expect to make mistakes and we should see our mistakes as steps along the way to competence.

To not make a mistake we have to err on the side of caution and not try anything new. Such a life would be deadening, literally and figuratively. What's more, we limit ourselves if we play it too safe.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery. JAMES JOYCE

The future belongs to us, because we have taken charge of it. We have the commitment, we have the resourcefulness, and we have the strength of our people to share the dream across Africa of clean water for all.

Airtight allegiance to place could make you a loser, left behind by the great sweep of a monochromatic, generalist world.

I really hope that we'll have a sustainable future on this planet, I really do. So I probably geek out mostly about learning more about how potentially we can hopefully make that happen, hopefully we're not too far lost.

Life is pressuring us to live by the robots' pleasures, I thought. Our appetites have given way to theirs. Robots aren't becoming us, I feared; we are becoming them.

Computer science was then generally a subdepartment of electrical engineering

Technology is not the driver of change; what drives technology is human desire.

Then, just when it seemed that only the barest of bugs survived, there would be a new version of the software. And with that, a fresh opportunity for introducing bugs.

I was the first person to go to university from my family.

I have always been thankful that Mother started teaching me ahead of time, because it enabled me to skip half the grades in school and thus get out quicker. To me, attending school was a gloomy and unjust imprisonment for offenses I had not yet committed. I still think it is unfair for the authorities to assume that children are going to be so wicked that they are prepared arbitrarily for institutional life instead of activities in the open.

Playing it safe is the most popular way to fail.

I don't like explosions. I don't mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs.