Quotes About Progress

tyranny of large numbers, explaining that "there's a natural tendency to think in terms of bigger bets as you get to be bigger.

finding ways to fail quickly, to invest less emotion and less time in any particular idea or prototype or piece of work, is a consistent feature of the work methods of successful experimental innovators.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it." After all, life is a creative process.

just failing is not the key; the key is to be systematically learning from failures.

Practicing little bets frees us from the expectation that we should know everything we need to know before we begin.

Ancient recipients of instant news probably couldn't do very much about it, for instance. Xerxes would still need three months to get his army together, and he might not get home for years.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Repetition plus translation plus generalization results, with the correct calculation, in clarification. If there is such a thing as 'progress in religion', it can only manifest itself as increasing explicitness.

Alors que ce mauvais siècle approche de sa fin, le pressentiment se répand que l'idée de faire histoire n'était qu'un prétexte. Le sujet décisif de la modernité, c'est de faire nature.

The human being does not hop out of the magician's hat in the way that the ape climbs down from the tree; he also does not emerge from the hand of a creator who surveys everything in advance with his foreknowledge. He is the product of a production that is not itself a human being. The human being was not yet what he would become before he became it.

Modernity has invented the loser.

Es wurde Herbst und Winter. Es wurde Sommer. Es wurde dunkel, und es wurde hell.

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

It takes at least 100 human generations for agricultural societies to develop into states

Gradually, human societies started extricating themselves from the worst forms of oppression. Human sacrifice and deified rulers went out of fashion. Slavery was outlawed, and privileges were taken away from nobles. Human societies regained much of the lost ground. We are still not as egalitarian as hunter-gatherers --there are the poor and the billionaires-- but we are much better off than we were during the days of god-kings.

People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven't got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom.

Finally, I surmise that mobility is generally a symbol of well-being: when people talk about the good life or about dreams for the future, they frequently use images of mobility as well. A better life is one in which one can move around, can go to places – whether the city or abroad – and can avail oneself of opportunities that are available there. Not

If this were your first annual review with our company, what would I be telling you right now? A: You'd be thanking me for a job well done and would be explaining how you look forward to continuing to see good work from me. Furthermore, I would anticipate your explaining how you really appreciated my putting in extra time on some key projects and how my creative thinking helped come up with some innovative solutions to existing problems.

You have to have more leadership, less management. It's about getting stuff done, you can sit around and analyze things forever but while you do that the competition has moved on.

When you can't let your stuff go, your stuff won't let you move forward.

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Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who thought that the French Revolution was the dividing line between the past and a 'glorious future', believed there were three outstanding issues in history – the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within one and the same nation, and the perfecting of mankind.

Perfection's unattainable but it isn't unapproachable.

What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?