Quotes About Progress

The future is there, Cayce hears herself say, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.

Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been.

Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.

My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years' time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.

The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him.

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn't happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming, anyway.

You need to learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work

Stability is the beginning of the end. We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward.

There are no backwaters where things can breed—our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We've arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.

The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.

It's more the way it is now than it's ever been," Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower's that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer.

It worked okay.

The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft

The drivers for the jackpot are still in place, but with less torque at that particular point." He took a seat at the table. "They're still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.

The future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career's employers have imagined.

The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.

Opportunities to do very badly were manifold. You avoided them. The major part in any success.

We are come not only past the century's closing, he thought, the millennium's turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure.

The big news in biology this week was the announcement that we've stopped evolving, in the biological sense. I'll buy that. Technology has stopped us, and technology will take us on, into a new evolution, one Mr. Bush never dreamed of, and neither, I'm sure, have I.

The whole industry wobbles along like a shopping cart with a missing wheel. You can only keep it moving if you lean on it a certain way and keep pushing, but if you stop, it tips over.

They built the first computers to crack German ice, right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way.