Quotes About Progress

Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve. (Think about that for a moment.)

The question now is, can we survive ourselves? Can we even manage to become the next human?

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep. —Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey In

Up from the ashes come the roses of success.

If they can put one man on the moon, why can't they put them all there?

El proceso de fabricar cosas ha empezado a parecerse más al proceso de producción digital.

3. You can't stop free.

If you think about it, today's hit is tomorrow's niche. Almost

Yet abundance is the driving force in all economic growth and change.

Rereading parts of your novel while writing is like doubling back at rerunning parts of a marathon midrace.

Today's tangents will become tomorrow's arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.

Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child)," Mau's maxim went. "Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

sometimes you just have to bury the dead and move on.

Even the most successful people in this world make mistakes. Often they're just better at correcting them and moving on.

Understandably, our Darwinian bodies and primitive brains are not going to catch up with this astonishing state of affairs. We live, in this new safety, in this new time of plenty, like drunken sailors freshly delivered from terrible peril.

Life is about making good choices, Matt. One after the other. They pile up day after day. It's only when you look back that you can see what the choices led to. What you're able to stand on.

We all make mistakes. That's why my pencil has an eraser.

The future belongs to the puzzle solvers.

This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. … It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction.

When it shall be said in any country in the world, 'My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness—when these things can be said," wrote Paine, "then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.

I'm just one generation between someone who cheered when Germans were burning and someone who doesn't even know that there is a border. That's a miracle - really is a miracle - and it gets me really emotional.

The microprocessor is a miracle.

Europe is a miracle.