Quotes About Progress

Diuen que cada floc de neu és diferent. Si això fos cert, com podria el món anar endavant? Com podríem aixecar-nos de les nostres genuflexions? Com podríem recuperar-nos d'una meravella així? Oblidant. No podem tenir massa coses al cap. Només existeix el present i no hi ha res per a recordar.

Everything we do is falling. Even walking is a kind of controlled falling. But that's not the same as failing.

The future is not fixed unless we allow it to be so.

Is it failure for morning to become afternoon?

All our faults, vanities, idiocies, prejudices, cruelty. Do you really want augmented humans, superhumans, uploaded humans, forever humans, with all the shit that comes with us? Morally and spiritually, we are barely crawling out of the sea onto dry land. We're not ready for the future you want. Have we ever been ready? said Victor. Progress is a series of accidents, of mistakes made in a hurry, of unforeseen consequences.

And I thought about women. All these books, and how long had it taken for women to write their share, and why were their still so few women poets and novelists, and even fewer who were considered to be important?

So the past, because it is the past, is only malleable where once it was flexible.

London is perpetual; a constant streaming present hurrying towards a receding future.

The future id foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial.

Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered. (Bk2:8)

there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigor of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves.

The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses.

an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other.

Sors de l'enfance, ami, revéille-toi!

How many centuries must have elapsed before men reached the point of seeing any other fire than that in the sky?

aunque nazca uno con algún talento, el arte de escribir no se aprende repentinamente. Remití

Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!

Tout est bien sortant des mains de l'Auteur des choses, tout dégénère entre les mains de l'homme.

There is, I feel, an age at which an individual man would want to stop. You will seek the age at which you would want your species to have stopped. Dissatisfied with your present state for reasons that portend even greater grounds for dissatisfaction for your unhappy posterity, perhaps you would like to be able to go backwards in time.

Les villes sont le gouffre de l'espèce humaine.

There is, I feel, an age at which the individual man would want to stop: you wi l seek the age at which you would desire your Species had stopped. Discontented with your present state for reasons that foretell even greater discontents for your unhappy Posterity, perhaps you would want to be able to go backward in time. This sentiment must be the Eulogy of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who will have the unhappiness to live after you.

Si hay que permitir a ciertos hombres el librarse al estudio de las ciencias y de las artes, es a aquellos que tengan fuerzas para andar solos en su busca y para adelantarlas. A

Un día tomé el Mercurio de Francia, y andando y leyendo encontré este tema propuesto por la Academia de Dijon para el premio del siguiente año: El progreso de las ciencias y de las artes ¿ha contribuido a corromper o a purificar las costumbres? Así