Quotes About Progress

They came out into the sunshine and the wind, one after the other like dice falling from a cup.

And yet, just because a story was a certain way didn't mean it would always be like that: stories took their old shape with them and fused it with the new shape. She didn't understand yet how all the tangles of their lives would sort themselves out in her story, but she supposed it would be like raking: not every bit of earth would be untangled at once.

Keep pace with the present. Take a trip to the moon. envision the future.

It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

The knowledge that every day there is something more to learn, something higher to reach for, something new to make for others, makes each day infinitely precious. And I am grateful.

You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

If you get too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might actually become unrooted, fossilized. At least in form, at least in style, you must get into the new stream, get the new roots. More of India is doing that. Style becomes substance in one generation. Things that one starts to do because other people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my father's case – become natural for the next generation.

It seemed as easy as that, if you came late to the world and found ready-made those things that other countries and peoples had taken so long to arrive at – writing, printing, universities, books, knowledge.

Because they could assess themselves, the Europeans were better equipped to cope with changes than we were.

around, beyond the trees, were the buildings. There you really did have an idea of the city as something made by man, and not as something that had just grown by itself and was simply there.

I don't know why they still building houses, Mr Biswas said. Nobody don't want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn't see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.

Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.

But in biological systems there is a deep unity between structure, function, and origin. You cannot make very much progress understanding any one of these unless you are also paying close attention to the other two.

during the past 30 years the maximum energy density of batteries has roughly tripled, and even if we were to triple that again densities would still be well below 3,000 Wh/kg in 2050—falling far short of taking a wide-body plane from New York to Tokyo or from Paris to Singapore, something we have been doing daily for decades with kerosene-fueled Boeings and Airbuses.

Claims about the dematerialization of modern economies and about a postindustrial world in which manufacturing does not matter are costly misinterpretations of fundamental realities.

In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds.

we create the modern world's material wealth with no more than a quarter of all energy we use.

In 1800 New England farmers (seeding by hand, with ox-drawn wooden plows and brush harrows, sickles, and flails) needed 150–170 hours of labor to produce their wheat harvest. By 1900 in California, horse-drawn gang-plowing, spring-tooth harrowing, and combine harvesting could produce the same amount of wheat in less than nine hours

extrasomatic

material for the records. The rubber was soon replaced by shellac, and that material was used

And long-distance electricity-powered commercial flight (equivalent to a kerosene-powered Boeing 787 from New York to Tokyo) is the outstanding example of the last category: as we will see, this is an energy conversion that will remain unrealistic for a long time to come.

The oldest crude stone tools came more than three million years ago, larger, well-crafted (bifacial) hand axes and cleavers followed only about 1.5 million years ago, wooden stone-tipped spears appear to be about half a million years old, and only about 25,000 years ago did the Upper Paleolithic hunters master the artisanal production of an array of composite tools, including adzes, axes, harpoons, needles, and saws, and accompanying pottery.

Actualmente, un habitante medio del planeta tiene a su disposición casi setecientas veces más energía útil que sus antepasados de principios del siglo XIX. Es más, durante la vida de las personas nacidas después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el índice se ha más que triplicado, de unos 10 a los 34 GJ/cápita entre 1950 y 2020.