Quotes About Progress

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

The method of doubt must be applied to civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.

The peoples of civilization see their wretchedness increase in direct proportion to the advance of industry.

Social progress and changes of historical period take place in proportion to the advance of women toward liberty, and social decline occurs as a result of the diminution of the liberty of women.

Under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself.

When we see civilization elated with this declining and decrepit phase of its career, we are reminded of a faded belle who, boasting of her attractions in her fiftieth year, excites at once the remark that she was fairer at twenty-five. So it is with civilization, which, dreaming of perfection and progress, is constantly deteriorating, and which will find but too soon in its industrial achievements new sources of political oppression, crimes and commotions.

People are very open-minded about new things--as long as they're exactly like the old ones.

You can't have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.

That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on

So too the growth of modern science depended on the premise of the individual's ability to judge evidence and argument for himself, free from the authority— though not the argument and evidence—of tradition.

Those who favor a "grand plan" over experimentation fail to understand the role that failed experiments play in creating progress in society. Failures quickly and efficiently signal what doesn't work, minimizing waste and redirecting scarce resources to what does work. A market economy is an experimental discovery process, in which business failures are inevitable and any attempt to eliminate them only ensures even greater failures.

Allowing people the freedom to pursue their own interests (within the limits of just conduct) is the best and only sustainable way to achieve societal progress. For individuals to develop and have a chance at happiness, they must be free to make their own choices and mistakes, rather than be forced to accept choices made for them by others.

The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort. —JOSEPH SCHUMPETER1

The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage, without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made.

relentlessly strive to come up with new and better products and produce them more efficiently than the alternatives.

I was especially fascinated by the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that entropy virtually always increases in a closed system. Entropy is a measure of disorder or uselessness. In lay terms, this means that progress stalls or declines when something is walled off from the outside world. Usually

The point is that progress—whether in business, an economy, or science—comes through experimentation and failure

The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is, and always will be, a wild animal.

To design the future effectively, you must first let go of your past.

Everything that can be invented, has been invented.

Understand that at times, you will feel uncomfortable. View that discomfort as progress; it's part of how you overcome your fears.

By perseverance the snail reached the ark.

Evolution: that last step was a doozy!

Those who are horrified at Mr. Darwin's theory, may comfort themselves with the assurance that, if we are descended from the ape, we have not descended so far as to preclude all hope of return.