Quotes About Progress

I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.

After a quarter of a century in politics, Roosevelt observed, he had found that change was realized by "men who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step.

If the problems created by the industrial age were left unattended, Roosevelt cautioned, America would eventually be "sundered by those dreadful lines of division" that set "the haves" and the "have-nots" against one another.

Until we address unequal history, we cannot overcome unequal opportunity." Until blacks "stand on level and equal ground," we cannot rest. It must be our goal "to assure that all Americans play by the same rules and all Americans play against the same odds.

Johnson insisted, "I don't want this symposium to come here and spend two days talking about what we have done, the progress has been much too small. We haven't done nearly enough. I'm kind of ashamed of myself that I had six years and couldn't do more than I did.

If the continuing problems created by the Industrial Age were not addressed, he warned, the country would eventually be "sundered by those dreadful lines of division" that set "the haves" and the "have-nots" against one another.

If ever there was a country unprepared for the war, it was the U.S. in 1940. And yet now, only four years later, the United States was clearly the most productive, most powerful country on the face of the earth.

Progressives (a combination of Midwestern

The habit of mobility had become ingrained.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present," he told Congress. "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

With McClure's support, Steffens embarked on an odyssey. For the better part of three years, he called on people in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, and Madison. "My business is to find subjects and writers, to educate myself in the way the world is wagging, so as to bring the magazine up to date," he explained to his father. "I feel ready to do something really fine.

To Lincoln's mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to "elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all." A

As Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. "It is never well to take drastic action," he liked to say, "if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.

So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

At the Second Inaugural, Lincoln asked his countrymen "to strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds." These same words nourished Franklin Roosevelt. He drew upon them, he said, because Abraham Lincoln had set goals for the future "in terms of which the human mind cannot improve.

In less than half a dozen years, seemingly from nothing and from nowhere, he had risen to become a respected leader in the state legislature, a central figure in the fight for internal improvements, an instrumental force behind the planting of the new capital, and a practicing lawyer. Given his beginnings, he had traveled an immense distance; yet, given the inordinate nature of his ambition to render himself worthy of his fellow men, he had hardly begun.

Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are

acknowledge errors and learn from

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. (So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ...)

To my mind the whole push and thrust and development of the world is towards the more complex, the flexible, the open-minded, the ability to entertain many ideas, sometimes contradictory ones, in one's mind at the same time.

Such people, such individuals, will be a most productive yeast and ferment, and lucky the society who has plenty of them.