Quotes About Progress

Why would we ever want to go back when your world is so accommodating with your telephones and your guns and what's that sticky stuff called ...duct tape.

Since when does the butterfly ask about the caterpillar?

Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page any more than they begin on the first page

If she'd known him better, she might've tried to explain to Will that life never lets you hide. Plant, animal, or human—life forced them all to grow and learn. The more you tried to run, the harder your path got, and you'd still have to travel it.

Perhaps the story now goes on beyond the book.

She and the writer got together to change this story for the better.

We don't care about what you did yesterday—we care about what you're going to do tomorrow.

Start at the beginning," he said. "Move one step in the direction of your goal. Remember that you can change direction to maneuver around obstacles. You don't need a plan, you need a vector.

For hundreds of years, the human race has dreamt of a world where knowledge could be shared universally, where every human being on the planet could have access to our storehouse of knowledge. Because knowledge is power, and shared knowledge is a superpower. Now, after centuries, we have it within our grasp to realize one of our most beautiful dreams.

I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?

Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.

Every wonderful thing in our world has a fight in its history: our rights, our good fortune, our happiness. All that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better.

Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you're thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.

Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.

you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.

When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven't even begun to feel the first tendrils of it.

The important thing is to convince people to make and share useful things. Fighting with greedy douches who don't share doesn't do that. Making more, living under conditions of abundance, that does it.

Was it just a coincidence that the only women who rose through the ranks in this industry acted like poster children for toxic masculinity? Was that my future, if I stayed in the business?

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way.

humans are bright enough to think our way out of the problems we think ourselves into.

Freedom isn't something technology gives you, technology is something you use to get freedom.

We can live like it's the first days of a better world, not the like it's the first pages of an Ayn Rand novel. Have this place, but you can't have us. We withdraw our company.

Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat.

You're going to hate to hear this, but you're too young to get it. Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you're thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned. You don't remember what life was like twenty years ago, before walkaways. You don't understand how different things are, so you think things don't change that much.