Quotes About Progress

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances… that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.

When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government

Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. Neither the Channel nor the Rhine will arrest its progress. It will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.

Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured.

Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched,than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

As to the learning that any person gains from school education, it serves only, like a small capital, to put him in a way of beginning learning for himself afterward.

What Athens was in miniature America will be in magnitude. The one was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration of the present.

Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosophy of another: he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him. —Thomas Paine, 1778

Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights.

The most effectual process is that of improving the condition of man by means of his interest.

We have it in our power to begin the world over again." -- Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Quizá los pensamientos que expongo en las siguientes páginas aún no están en boga ni tienen el favor general. El viejo hábito de no pensar que algo está mal puede dar la sensación de que está bien, y genera en un primer momento el impulso de defender las costumbres. Pero el tumulto pronto se apacigua. El tiempo hace más conversos que la razón.

Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosophy of another: he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him. —Thomas Paine, 17781

We have entered a way of progress that has no limit to its advance, a shining pathway through the earth and heaven that has no noontide height from which to slowly and sadly decline but that moves onward and upward to the throne of God, and the perfect day.

At every step of this moving upward into larger life, from seed to man, pain is seen to be an attendant fact. The seed or bird or man could well say, "Thank you pain; by you I have come into higher, larger life."

Life is pretty simple You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

The road to success is filled with women pushing their husbands along.

science is the salvation narrative of modernity.

Nous ne parlons pas de l'émancipation des femmes par charité, mais parce que pour nous c'est une base nécessaire pour le triomphe de notre révolution".

We must dare to invent the future.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.