Quotes About Progress

High modernism implies, as we have seen, a rejection of the past as a model to improve upon and a desire to make a completely fresh start. The more utopian the high modernism, the more thoroughgoing its implied critique of the existing society.

Non è un'esagerazione dire che la caccia e la raccolta sono, in termini di complessità, tanto differenti dalla coltivazione dei cereali quanto la coltivazione dei cereali è, a sua volta, distante dal lavoro ripetitivo di una moderna catena di montaggio. Ogni passo rappresenta una sostanziale riduzione degli obiettivi e una semplificazione dei compiti.

It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many

If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of highmodernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius N~erer

First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were gods. Second, their actions, far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition—a desire with a fatal flaw. That these tragedies could be so intimately associated with optimistic views of progress and rational order is in itself a reason for a searching diagnosis. Another

History is a record of human nature in action.

Human tragedy, of its essence, consists in the denigration of what is in the name of what is to come

I'll thank you to remember that not so many years ago men were burned at the stake just for saying the earth went round the sun!

My captain will help you be very quick. Within three sticks." The unit of time was the time it took for a standard stick of incense to smolder away, approximately one hour for one stick.

Like every serious student, follow the most important law for all students: repay your teacher by making it your duty to surpass him!

What is past, one cannot change, so each backward glance is a bit of the present slipping away.

When even the bartenders lose their romantic notions, it's time for a better world.

Among his innovations was the Liberty ship, a cargo vessel that could be mass-produced virtually like an oceangoing Model T. Using a breakthrough welding technique, submerged arc welding, that could stitch steel plate with molten rivets up to twenty times faster than existing methods, Kaiser's shipbuilders produced a Liberty ship in an average of only forty-two days.

Still, the unfamiliar power of a new technology was seldom a match for a complacent human mind bent on ignoring it.

Very few men attain enough of human knowledge to be fully aware how much remains to be learned, and of that which they never can hope to acquire.

The past doesn't matter. People cling to it because it allows them to ignore the present.

It's been great getting better with you.

The future is unwritten. What will be will be.

I turn and I slowly walk away and I don't look back. It has always been a fault of mine, but it is the way I am. I never look back. Never.

We ask for progress, not perfection. Just do your best.

They say confront the difficult while it is easy, accomplish the great one step at a time. They say let things come and let things go and live without possession and live without expectation.

If you want to be whole, you must first be partial.

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person's mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated—created from connections that were not there before

There is no getting into the future except by waiting.