Quotes About Progress

Since the days of ancient Alexandria libraries had stood for all the best that mankind could achieve. The very existence of libraries held out hope for the future of the human race, as far as Letty was concerned. If people had enough sense to collect and store information and make it available to everyone, perhaps they would someday have enough sense to use that wisdom to stop wars and find a cure for cancer.

Life never stood still, no matter how hard you tried to hold onto it.

For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end.

Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions.

The only impossible revolution, says Ceronetti in substance, one that is even inconceivable to reason, would be the revolution against machines- and this impossibility turns all other revolutions into a schizophrenic farce.

Secondary-school pupils are demanding more school, more funding, more staff, more security. Nineteenth-century demands. School is finished. All we can do is transform it into a gigantic Web cafe. In their own heads, the school students have already moved over into multimedia and the twenty-first century, as is attested by the incongruity of the demonstrations, including the incongruity of the anachronistic violence of the hooligan element.

We are simplified by technical manipulation

We are simplified by technical manipulation. And this manipulation goes off on a crazy course when we reach digital manipulation

science never sacrifices itself, it is always murderous)

We have at this millennium end produced the perfect specimen of the species in the form of mobile-phone man. But even he will disappear before the future digital prosthesis, who will leave room in turn only for telepathic ghosts.

Our greatest adversaries now threaten us only with their disappearance.

I might swing from branch to branch, but always in the same tree.

Sadness flies away on the wings of time.

We'll burn that bridge when we come to it!

From the time we began to build houses and cities, since we invented the wheel, we have not advanced one step toward happiness. We have always been in halves. As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.

On comprenait que les hommes pourraient être aussi efficaces que Dieu dans d'autres domaines que la destruction.

You're only as successful as the last book you published, and you're only as good as the next book you're writing. So shut up and write.

It is a great and beautiful spectacle to see a man somehow emerging from oblivion by his own efforts, dispelling with the light of his reason the shadows in which nature had enveloped him, rising above himself, soaring in his mind right up to the celestial regions, moving, like the sun, with giant strides through the vast extent of the universe, and, what is even greater and more difficult, returning to himself in order to study man there and learn of his nature, his obligations, and his end.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

If Sparta and Rome perished, what state can hope to live forever? Hence, if we wish to form a lasting institution, let us not think about making it eternal. In order to succeed we should not attempt the impossible, or flatter ourselves that we are giving the work of men a solidity that does not belong to human things.

I am not the same man I was when you found me. You have changed me, woman, and I love you for it." "I, too, am changed, Jondalar. I love you.

The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

Saved, rescued, but not quite so good as new...

I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing.