Quotes About Progress

In order for the postmodern worldview to emerge fully and mature, it needs, among other things, a better sense of history—an idea of what it is the human species has found out about itself in recent centuries, and what effects that discovery has had on us. It is not hard to find some of that in the public record. The postmodern worldview has been a long time in coming. And in recent decades it has been anything but shy about proclaiming its imminent arrival.

In order for the postmodern worldview to emerge fully and mature, it needs, among other things, a better sense of history—an idea of what it is the human species has found out about itself in recent centuries, and what effects that discovery has had on us. It

Since you can't change the past, you may as well make the best of the present.

Get something to improve yourself at least 1% each day

Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill.

The most important investment you can make is in yourself.

I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

The more you learn, the more you earn.

If you wait till you know everything it's too late

I do wish, however, that Ms. Olson would give me some credit for the progress I've already made. In 1944, I filed my first 1040, reporting my income as a thirteen-year-old newspaper carrier. The return covered three pages. After I claimed the appropriate business deductions, such as $35 for a bicycle, my tax bill was $7. I sent my check to the Treasury and it — without comment — promptly cashed it. We lived in peace.

Read 500 pages like this every week. That's how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.

It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction.

The best investment you can make is in yourself.

For these investors, it would have been far better if Orville had failed to get off the ground at Kitty Hawk: The more the industry has grown, the worse the disaster for owners.

While investors and managers must place their feet in the future, their memories and nervous systems often remain plugged into the past. 

Accounting numbers, of course, are the language of business and as such are of enormous help to anyone evaluating the worth of a business and tracking its progress. Charlie and I would be lost without these numbers: they invariably are the starting point for us in evaluating our own businesses and those of others. Managers and owners need to remember, however, that accounting is but an aid to business thinking, never a substitute for it.

One of the lessons your management has learned—and, unfortunately, sometimes re-learned—is the importance of being in businesses where tailwinds prevail rather than headwinds.

Go to bed a little smarter each day.

For 240 years, it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America.

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it

What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

These things are going to look primitive to you, but you have to remember that we're not stupid. We have the same intelligence as you. We simply don't have the same cumulative knowledge you do. So we apply our intelligence to what we have.

How are we supposed to live in the future when the future just abandons us to the night?