Quotes About Progress

I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

To destroy abuses is not enough; habits must be changed.

Let no one misunderstand our idea; we do not confound what are called 'political opinions' with that grand aspiration after progress with that sublime patriotic, democratic, and human faith, which, in our days, should be the very foundation of all generous intelligence.

A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.

Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.

Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of the ages.

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because it must be that it is.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are done, we recognize one thing: that the human race has been badly manhandled, but that it has moved forward.

In saying no to progress, it is not the future which they condemn, but themselves. They give themselves a melancholy disease; they inoculate themselves with the past. There is but one way of refusing tomorrow, that is to die.

It will come, citizens, the day when all shall be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is so that it may come that we are going to die.

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.

It's not enough to abolish abuse; custom must also be transformed. The mill was pulled down, but the wind still blows.

Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded. Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,—this is the very struggle of progress.

In the future no one will kill anyone, the earth will shine, the human race will love. It will come, citizens, the day when all will be peace, harmony, light, joy, and life, it will come. And it is so that it comes that we are going to die.

If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress, call it To-morrow.

In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.

Running beer gathers no foam.

After the dazzling orgies in form and color of the eighteenth century, art was put on a diet, and allowed nothing but the straight line. This sort of progress ended in ugliness. Art reduced to a skeleton, was the result. This was the advantage of this kind of wisdom and abstinence; the style was so sober that it became lean.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

Progress is the goal, the ideal is the type. What is this ideal? It is God. Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity: identical words.

It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come