Quotes About Progress

I will learn by screwing up.

The quickest way to rectify that mistake (choosing the wrong person) is by learning from that, moving on, and choosing much more wisely in the future.

Perfection is my willingness to be less than perfect

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Isn't that what the Peerless is for? Anything too difficult for the home world?

Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a pre-ordained trajectory, onward and upward toward "perfection.

The only way up is up.

I look up at her. "Let's not make a big deal of this. It's time for me to become a machine.

Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.

Every few decades, at random, I take on new goals, at random. It's perfect. How could I improve on a scheme like that? I'm not stuck on any one thing forever; however much you think I'm wasting my time, it's only for fifty or a hundred years. What difference does that make, in the long run?

Seven genders – and all of them perceived as monolithic. Everyone stereotyped at a glance. Seven pigeon-holes instead of two isn't progress.

No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren't reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.

No one objects to the notion that every technological civilisation might undergo its own Introdus.

life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.

Sooner or later. It had better be sooner. Later is like the horizon; it recedes as you approach.

you have to leave something behind to go forward -Newton's Third Law of Motion

In sports, people reach their peak very early. You have to move on. I don't know if I will ever surpass what I did at the Olympics, but I'm still doing the work I always wanted to do.

But what I really believe is education is a key to pretty much everything - prosperity, economics, peace, stability.

You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won't change.

hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.

Jesus chose the disciples for what they would become, not for what they were at the time of their call.

John Kotter in Leading Change says that a primary reason why change does not occur is that there is no sense of urgency.