Quotes About Progress

Even if Democrats do succeed, it won't save us. While there are many great Democrats and many exceptions to the trends I have described in this book, by and large the story has been a disappointing one. We have surveyed this party's thoughts and deeds from the Seventies to the present, we have watched them abandon whole classes and regions and industries, and we know now what the results have been. Their leadership faction has no intention of doing what the situation requires.

What is certain is that the liberalism of scolding will never give rise to the kind of mass movement that this country needs.

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.

Good is not good where better is expected

All things are difficult before they are easy.

One is always nearer by not keeping still.

Only a scientific people can survive in a scientific future.

Science comits suicide when it adopts a creed.

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

science, properly used, could undo much of the damage men had done.

I would call that field of play--the place in which humans test their natural limits and often break them--science.

We can only learn so much and live.

The improver of natural science absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

We have conceived a new idea, Inglish. We will send the ito

While he was conscious of improving at every stroke, he did not feel that the other was asserting any superiority over him; and so, though more humble than at the most disastrous period of his downward voyage, he was getting into a better temper every minute.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

The medieval university looked backwards it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.

the bad stuff will ultimately turn good if you wait long enough, and the good stuff will turn bad over time.

Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.