Quotes About Progress

We didn't start the sexual revolution but I think we gave it a good kick in the pants!

You're stuck in the past,' sighed May, returning to his paper. 'I'm not, I'm just too busy catching up to deal with the present. I'll get to the present eventually.' He dug his knife back into the toaster. 'You mean you'll get to it at some time in the future.' 'Yes, when I've finished with the past. I want to know everything before I die, and I'm running out of time.' His knife slipped and catapulted breadcrumbs across the office.

Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

The only known cure for poverty is emancipation of women

If anyone's interested in the alleviation of poverty... the only thing we know definitely works is giving women control over their own reproduction

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astonomy takes the place of astrology.

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers.

Bad habits have brought me this far: why change such a tried-and-true formula?

Revolution from above, in some states and cases, is [...] often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.

every day represents more and more subtracted from less and less

Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward.

Find a society that's adopted the teachings of Spinoza, Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits—as a result of doing that—into famine and war and dictatorship and torture and repression. That's the experiment I would like to run. I don't think that's going to end up with a gulag.

Hegel said that history was the story of freedom becoming conscious of itself.

However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of "progress," in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection.

Dios no creó al ser humano a su imagen y semejanza. Evidentemente, fue al revés, lo cual constituye la sencilla explicación para toda esta profusión de dioses y religiones y para la lucha fratricida, tanto entre cultos distintos como en el seno de cada uno de ellos, que se desarrolla continuamente a nuestro alrededor y que tanto ha retrasado el progreso de la civilización.

There is an intriguing paradox here: evolution does not have eyes but it can create them.

We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.