Quotes About Progress

To hold in one's mind that a central transforming force is always at work in the world - the force of evolution itself - enables one to see that a person may be learning while not knowing he is doing so.

After all, this situation, a similar one, is bound to roll around again, in a different context, a different history. Everything does. And the next time, will we (humankind) recognise it and do better?

Die Zeit nimmt auf niemanden Rücksicht, ob es uns nun gefällt oder nicht.

Now he drops his self-parody and says with great seriousness: "My dear Ella, don't you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution—they're nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.

This may be animal behaviour, I don't know, but it is certainly human behaviour, when humans allow themselves to revert to barbarism, and has been for thousands, probably even millions of years -- depending on where one decides to put the beginning of our history as humans, not animals.

To reflect that it is nearly always those leaders who claim to be in the forefront of progress, enlightenment, etc. who are the most ready to invoke blood, does offer the pleasures of irony.

the progress of which mankind is so proud, may well be known to the gods by another name.

I passed whole portions of my life—days, months, years—in pure directed progress, getting up every morning and setting to work, working so hard and so continually that I avoided examining in any way what I knew about my life. Busywork became a trance state. I ignored who I really was and how I became that person, continued in that daily progress, became an automaton who was what she did.

Look around you. Apartheid is being dismantled and Nelson Mandela walks the streets of South Africa. Until a few years ago, I could not imagine that happening. Russia is a new place, so is China. The communist bogeyman I was threatened with throughout my childhood is gone. The world is no less dangerous, and people are still dying for their origins, beliefs, color, and sexuality, but I find myself full of startled awe and hope. The rigid world into which I was born has been shaken profoundly.

The world is a new place, but it still needs to be remade. We still need revolutionaries.

Tobie. Unless I'm giving off steam, behave normally. I remember what to do. One foot in front of the other, but not both at the same time unless I'm a robin.

The board is clearing. The old game is almost played, and the pieces broken.

As a man, this child would be one's offering to the future races of men. The burden of his upbringing, wherever it fell: however tiresome or onerous, was of no importance compared with his living grasp of the future.

He is not immutable. No man can be.

At every second location Danny said monotonously, 'You can't do that,' and Plummer bridled and said, 'They built Sviajsk three years ago in four weeks. They felled the timber at Uglich and floated the logs down the Volga——' 'The cost. The cost, you fool!' Danny would scream.

Unlike Kate, this girl had broken from her setting. All that Kate was, she now had. And standing on Kate's shoulders, something more, still growing; blossoming and yet to fruit. All that he was not.

Discomfort without hope of betterment is not a great springboard.

It's terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality

the problems changed, but people were the same

make sense out of a world that could produce trips to the moon and silicon chips and computer robots and satellites, yet never touch the impoverished hearts that could still torture, terrorize and kill without mercy or feeling.

We are not a problem people, we are people with problems.

But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious.

At twenty years of age, the old-fashioned schooling turned me out helpless, ignorant and dissatisfied. Forty years later I encounter the product of the new schooling — still more helpless, still more ignorant, and possibly not even dissatisfied.

Bother the right man!" cried Miss Findlater, crossly. "I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful—like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.