Quotes About Progress

True, its people were much better off in material terms at the end of the century than at its outset, but man's sense of well-being depends upon comparison with others as well as upon his absolute condition.

A healthy modern society must know how to remain the same as well as change, to conserve as well as to reform. Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilised—that men become fully human.

The work of cultural destruction, while often swifter, easier, and more self-conscious than that of construction, is not the work of a moment. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition.

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

As society advances the standard of poverty rises.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

When I was a lark, I sang;When I was a worm, I devoured.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

The one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight... It should be the growing nation with a future which takes the long look ahead.

I took the Isthmus, started the Canal, and then left Congress—not to debate the Canal, but to debate me…. While the debate goes on the Canal does too.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.

Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

Life means change; where there is no change, death comes.

Again, a few generations ago an American workman could have saved money, gone West and taken up a homestead. Now the free lands were gone. In earlier days a man who began with pick and shovel might have come to own a mine. That outlet too was now closed, as regards the immense majority, and few, if any, of the one hundred and fifty thousand mine workers could ever aspire to enter the small circle of men who held in their grasp the great anthracite industry.

The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals.