Quotes About Progress

The victory of conservatism and the profound transformation brought about over the course of the next three decades was thus far from inevitable: it took an intellectual revolution.

Keynes's warning on this matter: "[i]t is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.

The history of the 20th century West is in large measure the history of efforts to answer these questions. The responses proved spectacularly successful:

The past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present - and the same is true if we fondly suppose that our own world is better in every way. The past really is another country: we cannot go back. However, there is something worse that idealising the past - or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.

The second dilemma we face concerns the social consequences of technological change.

If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear.

If we compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether measured by overall assets or annual income, we find that in every continental European country as well as in Great Britain and the US, the gap shrank dramatically in the generation following 1945.

The disappearance of so many regimes so closely bound to a revolutionary narrative marked the death knell of a 200-year promise of radical progress.

Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.

The consequences are clear. There has been a collapse in intergenerational mobility:

by 1945 few people believed any longer in the magic of the market. This was an intellectual revolution.

The most obvious symptom of the change came in the form of 'planning'.

The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that "[i]n many respects the social democratic consensus signifies the greatest progress which history has seen so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances."12

the old ideological Left was part of the problem, not the solution. In

Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier.

World history is not the soil in which happiness grows. Periods of happiness are empty pages in it'. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Nothing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public housing of modern times. From Communist Poland through

La Primera Guerra Mundial destruyó la vieja Europa; la Segunda Guerra Mundial generó las condiciones para una nueva.

How am I going to live today to create the tomorrow I've committed to?

If you do what you have always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.

There's more to blackness than bludgeoning people with memories of past atrocities and injustices or the discussion of how difficult it is to be black and deal with whites.

I found that life has to be edited to continue.

California is where you get to start over.

Our lives are becoming more convenient but less tangible, and bookshops are the victims of that choice.