Quotes About Progress

When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.

Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.

life must breed.

Nothing is lost in history: sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life.

Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the weak.

Utopias of equality are biologically doomed[.]

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present

Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution;

In agriculture the stick became the hoe; in war it became the lance or javelin or spear, the sword or bayonet.

If men were entirely social, man would stagnate; a certain alloy of individualism and competition is required to make the human species survive and grow.

Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in logic; and when the past is put out through the door it comes in at the window.

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

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.

Nor may we define progress in terms of happiness, for idiots are happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respect seek not happiness but greatness.

Let us provisionally define progress as "increasing control of the environment by life," and let us mean by environment "all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of desire." Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.

all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

When science has sufficiently ferreted out the forms of things, the world will be merely the raw material of whatever utopia man may decide to make.

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Now

Barbarism, like the jungle, does not die out, but only retreats behind the barriers that civilization has thrown up against it, and waits there always to reclaim that to which civilization has temporarily laid claim.

They measured time by a clepsydra or water-clock, and a sun-dial, and these seem to have been not merely developed but invented by them.

The Bourbons might have preserved themselves," said Napoleon, "if they had controlled writing materials. The advent of cannon killed the feudal system; ink will kill the modern social organization.

War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.

Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human. We are born ridiculous, malodorous animals. We become human. We have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance--whose preservation, emulation, and transmission places mankind today, with all of its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plain than any generation has ever reached before.

La naturaleza ama la diferencia como material necesario para la selección y la evolución;