Quotes About Progress

The future is unpredictable.

Objective leaders identify their unproductive mental models and tweak them for greater effectiveness.

My first two years, with Metro, were quite unproductive. Then I had a year at Columbia that was a complete disaster.

Every job I took, I was deeply uncomfortable in terms of feeling unqualified. Every step, every risk I took, built confidence.

It is important that we work toward a better future. You can make a difference. Don't listen to people who say you are unqualified, you can start a change and see it through.

You can't look at the problem and say, 'I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.' It's unrealistic.

The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.

It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that some portion of the neglect of science in England, may be attributed to the system of education we pursue.

It's not unreasonable to imagine that, at least as we're in a transition to a world economy, it's still necessary now to pay attention to how our country is doing economically in comparison with other countries.

Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality. It is a hard, undigested, tasteless, devitalized proposition. It is a half-fledged, unmusical, Promethean abomination. It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity.

A lot of people try to evolve in unreasonable ways and I don't agree with them. But you must evolve and be better than the same guy next to you, at the same time being able to work with the guy next to you.

A lot of crime writing suffers from treading water. I feel an obligation to move the character on and not repeat myself. I try to fit him into a different period and a different agenda. That way, you learn slightly more about his personal history in the tradition of the unreliable narrator. It makes it more challenging to write.

Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.

Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.

I grew up in the early '60s, and there was a lot of civil rights, a lot of unrest in our country.

I used to feel unsafe right in the moment of an accomplishment - I felt the ground fall from under my feet because this could be the end. And even now, while everyone is celebrating, I'm on to the next thing. I don't want to get lost in this big cushion of success.

Playing safe is probably the most unsafe thing in the world. You cannot stand still. You must go forward.

I'm a person and an actor that's constantly unsatisfied. I'm always reaching for something higher.

I'm constantly unsatisfied with any situation, which is both good and bad, because never being fully happy drives me to better every day... but I don't enjoy the things that I do even when I do them great.

All along the untrodden paths of the future, I can see the footprints of an unseen hand.

The torrent of centuries rolling over the human race, has continually brought new perfections, the cause of which, ever active though unseen, is found in the demands made by our senses, which always in their turns demand to be occupied.

The American middle class has always existed to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable: settled values with unsettled ones, social mobility with a sense of permanence.

The more you fly, the more unsettling it is, because you realize how much more likely it will be for you to crash. I am getting better at it, though.

Usually the first problems you solve with the new paradigm are the ones that were unsolvable with the old paradigm.