Quotes About Progress

U onome što danas izgleda kao brava, koja te odvaja od tvoga cilja, sutra možeš prepoznati klju?.

La medicina es como una lenta obra de albañilería. Somos afortunados si en el plazo de una vida podemos poner un solo ladrillo. Y si podemos explicar la enfermedad, alguien que aún no ha nacido estará en condiciones de conseguir su curación.

It's not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures- it's inevitable. But unless the process that is taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world, unless that continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

Social action must be animated by a vision of a future society, and by explicit judgments of value concerning the character of this future society.

Not all evils can be rectified, but ongoing evils surely should stop.

I'm quoting, so pardon the sexist language, but somewhere or other he said: socialism is an effort to try to solve man's animal problems, and after having solved the animal problems, then we can face the human problems—but it's not a part of socialism to solve the human problems; socialism is an effort to get you to the point where you can face the human problems

I don't think we're smart enough to design, in any detail what a perfectly just and free society would be like. I think we can give some guidelines and more significant, we can ask how we can progress in that direction.

Yes, it's simple, really. If you're riding a bicycle and you don't want to fall off, you have to keep going - fast.

no form of politics is worth our time until it helps struggling people get what they need, sustainably and reliably. All the better if you can do so without patriarchy and fundamentalism.

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward—a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.

but unless Western populations can rise to the level of Egyptians they're going to remain victims.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win," Mahatma Gandhi.

Una reforma de los primeros niveles de la educación podía provocar cambios sociales significativos.

There is no contradiction here. People live and suffer and endure in the real world of existing society, and any decent person should favor employing what means are available to safeguard and benefit them, even if a long-term goal is to displace these devices and construct preferable alternatives. In

Median real income is below its level of twenty-five years ago. For males, median real income is below what it was in 1968.

anyone can consider what he now knows and can ask what he knew twenty years ago, and can see that in some unclear fashion he was striving towards something which he can only now understand … if he is fortunate.

As Chomsky says, if you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours, the choice is yours. Robert

History doesn't go in a straight line... Over time there's a kind of a general trajectory towards a more just society, with regressions and reversals of course.

I don't have anything against bulldozers; I think they're great. It's a lot better than digging with a shovel.

stupid orders for years and years—that's the way I did it, for example. Like, you're told by some stupid teacher, "Do this," which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you

I don't have anything against bulldozers. I think they're great. A lot easier than digging with a shovel.

If you go back to a century ago, the major problems of electrical and mechanical engineering had to do with how to place a huge gun on a moving platform, namely a ship, designing it to be able to hit a moving object, another ship, so naval gunnery. That was the most advanced problem in metallurgy, electrical and mechanical engineering, and so on. England and Germany put huge efforts into it, the United States less so. Out of associated innovations comes the automotive industry.

The struggle against slavery went on forever, the struggle for women's rights has been going on for centuries, the effort to overcomewage slavery—that's been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, we haven't advanced an inch. In fact, we're worse off than we were a hundred years ago in terms of understanding the issues. Well, okay, you just keep struggling.

The new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. This is not pointed at anyone. —Max Planck