Quotes About Progress

If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, he would have given man a moon.

Man thrives, oddly enough, only in the presence of a challenging environment.

Religion holds a man back from the path, prevents his stepping forward, for various very plain reasons. First, it makes the vital mistake of distinguishing between good and evil.

Man's upward progress means ever increasing difficulty, which is to be welcomed.

Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.

Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.

It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world. And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.

The revolution proceeded routinely and according to the rules of networked 21st-century protest.

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive.

How could a man become a god? Nell asked. By living in an extremely pragmatic society, said Constable Moore after some thought

We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine.

One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world's adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything.

it might be true in the future." "But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.

I'm surprised at you! If it will take ten years to make the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new technology, then you can do it in seven years by inventing the new technology first!

Technology is making borders irrelevant. The governments who still value their borders refuse to understand this basic fact.

In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

It wasn't only the Lorites who said that is not a new result. People re-invented the wheel all the time. There was nothing shameful in it. If the rest of us oohed and aahed and said, "Gosh, a wheel, no one's ever thought of that before," just to make that person feel good, nothing would ever get done.

When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.

The last ship home has sailed. From now on, launch vehicles will rise up into orbit, but they will not go back for ten thousand years.

After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage