Quotes About Progress

The First World War shook the scaffolding of progress because it was deadly and unexpectedly long: it showed that technology could be two-faced. The war delivered one other insidious attack on the idea of progress by raising a moral question which the believers in progress had taken for granted: had the morality of Europeans improved during the long era of 'progress'?

Manchester's disciples believed that paradise was an international bazaar. They favoured the international flow of goods and ideas and the creation of institutions that channeled that flow and the abolition of institutions that blocked it. Nations, they argued, now grow richer though commerce than though conquest.

In the palace of glass and iron, the locomotive and telegraphic equipment were admired not only as mechanical wonders; they were also messengers of peace and instruments of unity.

Christianity has both spurred and retarded the sciences and social sciences. Indeed, most of the modern debates of profound significance were originally dialogues with or within Christianity.

For out of olde feldes, as men seyth,Cometh al this newe corn fro yer to yere;And out of olde bokes, in good feyth,Cometh al this newe science that men lere.

By nature, men love newfangledness.

For thogh we slepe, or wake, or rome, or ryde,Ay fleeth the tyme, it nyl no man abyde.

Thurgh thikke and thurgh thenne.

Thing that is seyd is seyd; and forth it gooth.

running anywhere is not the same as running somewhere.

After two or more centuries of experimentation, socialists should be able to point to an alternative system that works, rather than comparing the actual world with an idealized system of their imagination.

By intelligently choosing their sexual partners for their mental abilities, our ancestors became the intelligent force behind the human mind's evolution.

Nothing that is will always be.- Open Mic Singer

So in marked contrast to infrastructure, which scales sublinearly with population size, socioeconomic quantities—the very essence of a city—scale superlinearly, thereby manifesting systematic increasing returns to scale.

In 2006 the planet crossed a remarkable historical threshold, with more than half of the world's population residing in urban centers, compared with just 15 percent a hundred years ago and still only 30 percent by 1950.

the fantastic power and ultimate absurdity of unchecked exponential growth.

The system we have evolved critically relies on people continually wanting new cars and new cell phones, new widgets and gadgets, new clothes and new washing machines, new thrills, new entertainment, and pretty much new everything, even when they already have enough of "everything.

When Curzon was rash enough to say that 'all civilisation has been the work of aristocracies', Churchill retorted, 'The upkeep of aristocracies has been the hard work of all civilisations

History started badly and hav been getting steadily worse.

We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.

I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism