Quotes About Progress

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of workers.

We had the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, now we're living in the Interfering Age.

I bought an Apple iPad and it was out of date sooner than a real apple would have been. We

This is the problem with inventing. Virtually everything has been done already. These days most things are just the same things but tweaked. Everything is 'new and improved'.

When you're going in the right direction, life always looks larger than what you're accustomed to.

Wisely and slow. They stumble that ran fast. — William Shakespeare

but one cannot look backward, only forward. What has passed has passed forever.

You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

In the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there. It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point.

What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people?" Sylvie said.

In the endgame a pawn can change into a queen.

First things were good, last things not so much so.

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.

If Richard had lived, perhaps... but one cannot look backwards, only forwards. What has passed has passed for ever. What is it Heraclitus says? One Cannot step in the same river twice?' ... 'More or less. I suppose a more accurate way of putting it would be You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

After Marlee was born they rented videos and fell asleep in front of them. Now, like so much else in Jackson's world, videos were obsolete.

So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.

White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people.

During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.

Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.

Who never walks save where he sees men's tracks makes no discoveries.

It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.

In the past few years I have begun the process of becoming a new man.

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well. And having done it well, he loves to do it better.

That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution . . . "The Ascent of Man.