Quotes About Progress

Science fiction didn't see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn't see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

There are no good futures. There's nothing to head towards but more garish, unsustainable carnival acts.

We are as gods on our little rock in the vast bleak cosmos and it's way past time we started getting good at that instead of just posing on Olympus and photoshopping our zits out. The future is more than an Instagram filter.

ADDENDUM: SOMETIMES THE FUTURE IS BULLSHIT

an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.

The near future? The future of anything is like some massive weather system on the horizon, pushing out thunderheads all over the place, and it's impossible to predict where the lightning will strike. And in 2011 it's worse than ever.

The future arrived here a couple of weeks ago and nobody noticed. Because that's how the future always arrives. You don't realize it's here until you bump into it.

Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.

The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things.

That's what you should be worrying about. Idiots with all the money, plowing it into building a thing just because they can.

That's how the future always arrives: you don't realize it's here until you bump into it.

Supermodernism. the fact that we don't build places just to live in anymore. We build places to go through. To wait in. To be transient [. . .] Supermodern spaces. Places to go through. And now look at this bloody city [Los Angeles]. Two hundred thousand fucking miles of road. Not even a city. A dozen towns stitched together by motorways.

It would take a human nine years to walk from the Earth to the moon.

In one generation, young men have gone from 61 percent of college degree recipients to a projected 39 percent; young women, from 39 percent to a projected 61 percent.

Everything in the world starts small and then becomes bigger—except bad things. They start big, and then get smaller.

If you have not experienced the death of self, your spiritual life will have little real progress.

When you reach perfection, it's a sure bet you can't get any better.

Each experience in your lifewas absolutely necessary in order to have gotten you to the next place, and the next place, up to this very moment.

When you are able to shift your inner awareness to how you can serve others, and when you make this the central focus of your life, you will then be in a position to know true miracles in your progress toward prosperity.

You are what you choose to be today. Not what you've chosen to be before.

My goal is not to be better than anyone else, but to be better than I used to be.

You cannot fail, you can only produce results.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. — George Bernard Shaw

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self. —ALDOUS HUXLEY