Quotes About Progress

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.

The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.

For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine.

It is a striving to attain the best. To throttle it would mean to stop all progress. Certain men do not need to compete. They are pioneers.

The man who will neither play nor do business unless everything is just to his liking and notions, retards rather than contributes to progress.

They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.

Not that which men do worthily, but that which they do successfully, is what history makes haste to record.

If a man has come to that point where he is no content that he says; I do not want to know any more, or do any more or be any more, he is in a state in which he ought to be changed into a mummy.

Education will not come of itself; it will never come unless you seek it; it will not come unless you take the first steps which lead to it; but, taking these steps, every man can acquire it.

The ancient bitter opposition to improved methods [of production] on the ancient theory that it more than temporarily deprives men of employment... has no place in the gospel of American progress.

Of old when folk lay sick and sorely tried The doctors gave them physic, and they died. But here's a happier age: for now we know Both how to make men sick and keep them so.

Forget the brother and resume the man.

Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and the other by water.

A man is not necessarily a master because he happened to compose two or three centuries ago. Let us beware of the worship of mere antiquity.

I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.

The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.

Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine.

No technique is possible when men are free. Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being.

The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again.

Writing a book I have found to be like building a house. A man forms a plan, and collects materials.

A liberal conservative is a man who thinks things ought to progress but would rather they remained as they are.

Make no mistake about it. The first man who will walk on the moon has already been born. I hope in America.

Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction.