Quotes About Progress

Utopias are often just premature truths.

Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?

It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.

You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.

Every year the media comes up with something to describe my race The first year it was "the comeback." Then it was the "the confirmation." I don't know what it was last year. This year, for me, it's "the year of the team." I can't say how I compare to the rider I was in 1999 or 2000 or 2001, but this team is much stronger than it has ever been. It has made it easier for me.

Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.

Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.

An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.

Who can object to a monopoly when any new company, if it is built around a scientific nucleus, can create a new monopoly of its own by creating a wholly new field?

All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

In my opinion, neither organisms nor organizations evolve slowly and surely into something better, but drift until some small change occurs which has immediate and overwhelming significance. The special role of the human being is not to wait for these favorable accidents but deliberately to introduce the small change that will have great significance.

We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.

You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.

Merit has rarely risen of itself, but a pebble or a twig is often quite sufficient for it to spring to the highest ascent.

Ordinary Negroes hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn't raised their wages any.

We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

Listen, Christ,You did alright in your day, I reckon—But that day's gone now.They ghosted you up a swell story, too,Called it Bible—But it's dead now.

O, let America be America again—The land that never has been yet—

The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow.

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again!

Final Curve When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left

Change is no loss, Will. Not always.

I just don't see why the past has to matter.