Quotes About Progress

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what's bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins.

You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven. The great aim of modern life has been to improve the future—or even just to reach the future, assuming that the future will inevitably be "better.

We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.

All good human work remembers its history.

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

It will probably be centuries, at least generations, before man will discover all or even most of the value in a quarter-tone extension. And when he does, nature has plenty of other things up her sleeve.

There are four things that hold back human progress. Ignorance, stupidity, committees and accountants.

[On the fall of the Bastille:] How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!

You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things the people with whom you associate and the books you read.

In all parts of the Old World, as well as of the New, it was evident that Columbus had kindled a fire in every mariner's heart. That fire was the harbinger of a new era, for it was not to be extinguished.

The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.

I object to people running down the future. I am going to live all the rest of my life there.

Give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me… signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe.

The world goes up and the world goes down, the sunshine follows the rain; and yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown can never come over again.

Young blood must have its course, lad, and every dog its day.

We've had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepherd rode Freedom 7 in 1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North Korea's is today.

America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.

Turns out we need to know one more thing on earth: politics--because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.

Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase "women and children"?

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.