Quotes About Progress

We display the success of what we have done by not having to do anything.

Who lives horizonally is never somewhere, but always in passage.

It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.

Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a 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.

Solo ciò che cambia può continuare.

Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance.

Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century's grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.

THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does.

Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves.

Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon.

An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player's way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future which itself has a future.

Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun and not finished in the past.

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got.

Let's just say that if these scientist had been using their brilliance for good instead of evil, cars would run off water vapor and leave fresh compost behind them; no one would be hungry; no one would be ill; all buildings would be earthquake-, bomb-, and flood-proof; and the world's entire economy would have collapsed and been replaced by one based on the value of chocolate.

We don't come smart out of the box.

He's America in action — opposed to quality.

We live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment...[it] enlarged the scope of human freedom, prepared our minds for the scientific method, made man the measure of all things, and placed individual consent front and center on the political stage.

Bureaucracy by its nature resists change and nullifies progress.

Taxes are a penalty on progress.

You can't go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a brand new ending.

We can become inspired to shape a higher, more ideal future, and when we do, miracles happen.

History is not just the evolution of technology; it is the evolution of thought.