Quotes About Progress

Will Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?

Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception, poison and surprise.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will." ? Thomas Pynchon

Holy-Center-Approaching is soon to be the number one Zonal pastime. Its balmy heyday is nearly on it. Soon more champions, adepts, magicians of all ranks and orders will be in the field than ever before in the history of the game. The sun will rule all enterprise, if it be honest and sporting. The Gauss curve will herniate toward the excellent. And tankers the likes of Närrisch and Slothrop here will have already been weeded out.

Slothrop's Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.

The Chinese remind us that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, yet they keep curiously silent about the step itself, which too often must be taken, as now, from inaccessible ground, if not indeed straight down into an unmeasured abyss.

Alcuni di noi, però, pur non andando da nessuna parte, ingannano se stessi, convincendosi invece che stanno andando da qualche parte: per ingannarsi a questo modo ci vuole una specie di talento naturale, e le obiezioni che si levano a questo riguardo sono rare, ma ciò nonostante insidiose.

We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky.

Now GE has connections with Siemens over here, they worked on the V-2 guidance

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward. Fortunemagazine{115}

In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools and colleges are producing artificial stupidity.

The replacement of human muscle by machine power, and the growing importance of industries and occupations not dependent on either, have made sex differences and age differences no longer as significant as they had once been.

The initial wealth of a group and its time of arrival are obviously important, as many wealthy "old families " show, but the Jews arrived late and penniless in the nineteenth century and are now more affluent than any other ethnic group.

our brightest kids have been going downhill even faster than our average kids.

A 1972 study showed that the amount of pollution per mile traveled by horse was a hundred times the amount of pollution per mile traveled by automobile.27 Since the cars produced in later years have had reduced pollution levels, the disparity today would be even greater. It should also be noted that the replacement of horses by automobiles made it possible to "restore more than 80 million acres of forestlands that had once been cleared for horse pasture."28

Eventually, however, the fact that many once-poor places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore achieved prosperity through freer international trade and investment became so blatant and so widely known that, by the end of the twentieth century, the governments of many other countries began abandoning their zero-sum view of economic transactions.

The people I feel sorry for are those who insist on continuing to do what they have always done but want the results to be different from what they have always been.

Engineers and mechanics were as much products of the industrialization process as the material goods and the machinery by which those goods were produced.

As late as 1876, there were more than a hundred foreign industrial workers in the Japanese railroad industry alone and, of these, 94 were British.

The hallmark of the vision of the anointed is that what the anointed consider lacking for the kind of social progress they envision is will and power, not knowledge. But to those with the tragic vision, what is dangerous are will and power without knowledge—and for many expansive purposes, knowledge is inherently insufficient

At the heart of the industrialization process was iron and steel, and Britain was pre-eminent in their production.

Even Karl Marx, who spent more than three decades living in Victorian England, acknowledged the rise in British workers' living standards between the 1840s and the 1860s.