Quotes About Progress

Explanations of the stability of technologies must take account of the social relations of work as

A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization.

But it is a maxim of mine that men (being superior creatures) are bound to improve women—if they can.

If you are as tired of reading this narrative as I am of writing it—Lord, how we shall enjoy ourselves on both sides a few pages further on!

When things are at the worst, they're sure to mend. Things can't be much worse, Mr. Franklin, than they are now.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding

In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.

Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

I thank God," he used to say, "that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it -perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew…

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.

By imagination and reason we turn experience into foresight; we become the creators of our future, and cease to be the slaves of our past.

One] of the fundamental principles of statesmanship: to persuade radicals that change must be gradual in order to be permanent, and to persuade conservatives that change must be.

It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellowmen, and merely made them slaves. A similar development on a larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war no longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities.

They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with their children, with parental care that will make their children a little finer than themselves. Life wins.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding"5

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.

Where there is no strife there is decay: