Quotes About Progress

It had always seemed to her that what people thought of as possible only revealed the borders of their own fragment of eternity. Two hundred years earlier, flight had been unimaginable, germs were undreamed of, and doctors treated the sick by bleeding them, sometimes to death. For Hallie, the only certainty was that the world and their knowledge of it would keep changing, which made the thing denoted by the word "impossible" itself an impossibility.

You don't get to a better place with God until you recognize that where you are is not as good.

Turning to him, Spurgeon said, "If you had gone up the way you came down, you could have come down the way you went up.

Many unions discriminated against them, in part because of their fear that if Negroes came in, white workers might well go out. The future looked no more encouraging; in December 1940 less than 2 per cent of the trainees under defense pre-employment and refresher courses were black. Negroes could

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

The war has proved moreover that our free Government, like other free governments, though slow in its early movements, acquires in its progress a force proportioned to its freedom, and that the union of these States, the guardian of the freedom and safety of all and of each, is strengthened by every occasion that puts it to the test.

In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we shd. not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. [James Madison in the U.S. Constitutional Convention, June 26, 1787. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 1:422.]

Sometimes you just have to be brave. You have to be strong. Sometimes you just can't give in to weak thoughts. You have to beat down those devils that get inside your head and try to make you panic. You struggle along, putting one foot a little bit ahead of the other, hoping that when you go backwards it won't be too far backwards, so that when you start going forwards again you won't have too much to catch up

The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.

God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you.

You know for many elected officials they all started in the same place. You know marriage is between a man and a woman, but they understand that they are moving inevitably, catching up to the American public.

The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

An artist's career always begins tomorrow.

The frontiers of knowledge in the various fields of our subject are expanding at such a rate that, work as hard as one can, one finds oneself further and further away from an understanding of the whole.

As Edward Albee put it neatly in his play The Zoo Story (1958): What I am going to tell you has something to do with how sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly….

The process of adapting to the new conditions was slow and painful, but it need not have been. It was fifteen years or more before the studios began dimly to understand how best to operate in the new environment. Aging owners and production heads rigidly clung to the old methods of mass production in studio complexes with enormous overhead costs.

The great increase of our population throughout the Union will alone produce an important effect, and in no quarter will it be so sensibly felt as in those in contemplation.

The movements of a great nation are connected in all their parts. If errors have been committed they ought to be corrected; if the policy is sound it ought to be supported.

Our country may be likened to a new house. We lack many things, but we possess the most precious of all - liberty!

That from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The reformer," Douglass explained in 1883, had "a difficult and disagreeable task before him. He has to part with old friends; break away from the beaten paths of society, and advance against the vehement protests of the most sacred sentiments of the human heart.

Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in the game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make.