Quotes About Progress

no acababa de entender que el conocimiento progresa por acumulación y en colaboración.

Si alguna vez surge una raza mentalmente sobrehumana —dijo en cierta ocasión Edward Teller, el creador de la bomba de hidrógeno—, sus miembros se parecerán a Johnny von Neumann.

slow and steady diligence is the true way to wealth.

One odd result of allowing super-enhancements could be that children will become like iPhones: a new version will come out every few years with better features and apps. Will children as they age feel that they are becoming obsolete? That their eyes don't have the cool triple-lens enhancements that are engineered into the latest version of kids? Fortunately, these are questions we can ask for amusement but not for an answer.

Human society first formed itself with the aid of oral speech, becoming literate very late in its history, and at first only in certain groups. Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago.

Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word.

Nietzsche says: "Nicht nur fort sollst du dich pflanzen sondern hinauf"—you should propagate yourself not only onward but upward: procreation need not be a senseless continuation of an essentially meaningless story and an addition of more and more zeros—it can really be a creation.

The priest knows only one great danger: that is science

These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress towards such an ideal. I think [democracy] is a false ideal.

There is an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be measured in human happiness.

Being challenged by the law was a rite of passage for any Negro who wanted to better himself or his situation.

The word hear will gain a new significance, while write will fall into disuse. And really, what will writing become when no one can read? And what will the future generations think of writing? Like we think of hieroglyphics, no doubt.

These were people who faced their fears and created the world as they moved through it.

I could imagine a life in a world maybe a hundred years from now where my ideas and some man's might be the same.

Life, he said, has little to do with progress. More often than not men make the decisions that lead to their own deaths. They delegate, hate, stay when all the signs say go. Mostly they're unwilling to make a deal. And they're almost all forgotten. No better remembered than a cockroach who succumbs to a poison that you set down under the pantry six months before.

WASTING TIME IS a big problem in the world we live in, that's for sure. But it doesn't mean that we necessarily have to know what the goal is for every step we take. Sometimes we do things that are not directly connected and yet are still significant.

America was changing at a snail's pace in a high wind, but until that gastropod mollusk reached its destination I had a .45 in my pocket and eyes on all four corners at once.

As Halsey looked over his shoulder from his campaigns across the Pacific, "the old battlefields were already disappearing into the jungle or under neat, new buildings. Where 500 men had lost their lives in a night attack a few months before, eighteen men were now playing baseball. Where a Jap pillbox had crouched, a movie projector stood. Where a hand grenade had wiped out a foxhole, a storekeeper was serving cokes. Only the cemeteries were left."20

In pursuing the goal of development, one must start with the producers and move on from there to see whether the products of their labor are being rationally utilized to bring greater independence and well-being to the nation.

Obviously, underdevelopment is not absence of development, because every people have developed in one way or another and to a greater or lesser extent. Underdevelopment makes sense only as a means of comparing levels of development. It is very much tied to the fact that human social development has been uneven and from a strictly economic viewpoint some human groups have advanced further by producing more and becoming more wealthy. (15)

Certain issues are not yet clear about the final shape of society in America. Some form of co-existence with whites is the desired goal of virtually all black leaders, but it must be a society which blacks have a hand in shaping, and blacks should have power commensurate with their numbers and contribution to US development. To get that, they have to fight.

Ancient Africa was int he mainstream of human history.

Whenever new knowledge of a transforming nature permeates the race, the standard of world culture rises.

The African villager with a solar powered smartphone has more access to more information than Louis XIV in the halls of Versailles.