Quotes About Progress

We were all moving to a pre-ordained end. You just had to open the papers and read the international news, or the crime reports. We didn't need nuclear weapons. We were killing each other with prehistoric savagery. We were just dinosaurs, and the worst thing of all was that we knew it.

When I began a diet a week before my stroke, I never dreamed of such a dramatic result.

No emotion is the final one.

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.

It was a long story, and like most of the stories in the world, never finished. There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does.

the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.

I have come so far so fast that I haven't had time to ask whether or not this is where I want to be

I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

where will we go next, when there are no more wildernesses?

Even our best endeavors turn against us. A loom that can do the work of eight men should free eight men from servitude. Instead, seven skilled men are put out of work to starve with their families, and one skilled man because the unskilled minder of the mechanical loom. What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?

Going mad is the beginning of a process, it's not meant to be the end result.

What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end.

And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?

One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn't happen to everyone.

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be.

Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a species as smart as Homo sapiens [Strange New World, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/boo... ].

A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.