Quotes About Progress

Life's not about feeling better; it's about getting the job done

Tis not the nodding of the head that rows the boat.' As

I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination

Scientific inquiry shouldn't stop just because a reasonable explanation has apparently been found.

God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.

Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.

As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.

In some ways, we are traveling in time now. We just happened to be prisoners of the present in the eternal transition from the past to the future.

if we don't act , we're just standing still. and the act of standing still is the same as moving backwards when everyone else is in motion all around us, around the world

Curious fact that those who never fail are also those who never truly succeed.

We're a sleepy nation right now. I want us to be a nation of innovation.

If I live a day and I don't know a little more than I did the day before, I think I wasted that day.

The day gets about one second longer every 67,000 years.

WHAT IS NOW PROVED WAS ONCE ONLY IMAGIND —WILLIAM BLAKE

The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their "low contracted prejudices." And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace, rather than fear, the cosmic perspective.

And what happens when you stop innovating? Everyone else catches up, your jobs go overseas, and then you cry foul: Ooohh, they're paying them less over there, and the playing field is not level. Well, stop whining and start innovating.

Astronomy, because of that peculiar history, has a fascinating legacy of early contributions by women.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

Listen up, because living off-planet might lie ahead.

Aluminum occupies nearly ten percent of Earth's crust yet was unknown to the ancients and unfamiliar to our great-grandparents. The element was not isolated and identified until 1827 and did not enter common household use until the late 1960s, when tin cans and tin foil yielded to aluminum cans and, of course, aluminum foil. (I'd bet most old people you know still call the stuff tin foil.)

It is often true that groundbreaking discoveries are made from poor data at the leading edge

Decade by decade: estimates of Pluto's size got smaller and smaller.

To other scientists, the scientist who corrects a colleague's error, or cites good reasons for seriously doubting his or her conclusions, performs a noble deed, like a Zen master who boxes the ears of a novice straying from the meditative path, although scientists correct one another more as equals than as master and student.