Quotes About Progress

The secret to success is to stop when you're ahead.

My master always said you couldn't beat a skill out of somebody. They had to learn in their own way and time. If you rushed them, you only delayed them. You had to be firm but not cruel. Cruelty is a barrier, and barriers slow people down.

The people who move forward and overcome their fears do not have some special powers or a magic pill they take; they just have more practice in facing their fears.

What we are doing to develop leaders is not working! We are treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.

Palestinian and Israeli leaders finally recover the Road Map to Peace, only to discover that, while they were looking for it, the Lug Nuts of Mutual Interest came off the Front Left Wheel of Accommodation, causing the Sport Utility Vehicle of Progress to crash into the Ditch of Despair.

And what other advances does the future hold, technology-wise? Even as you read these words, white-coated laboratory geeks are working on a revolutionary new camera that not only will focus automatically, set the exposure automatically, flash automatically, and advance the film automatically, but will also automatically refuse to take stupid pictures, such as of the wing out the airplane window.

Can we move this conversation along, old chap? I'm getting frightfully tired of

And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.

my problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity.

Stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move.

But I'm a believer in the perfectibility of human beings. I think we can be better. I think we can be perfect or near to it. And when we become our best selves, the possibilities are endless. We can solve any problem. We can cure any disease, end hunger, everything, because we won't be dragged down by all our weaknesses, our petty secrets, our hoarding of information and knowledge. We will finally realize our potential.

Some days he climbed over the foothills of indifference to see the landscape of his life and future for what it was: mappable, traversable, achievable.

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Kit, you say your mother hasn't changed, but she has. A hundred times she's changed. It's important to know with adults, thought there is continual development, there is not always improvement. There is change, but not necessarily growth.

The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake.

There would be a time when the world created people stronger than them. When all of this got worked out. But until then there would be women and men like Hanne and Alan, who were imperfect and had no path toward perfection.

Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.

Infocommunism.

People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate.

What had been intriguing on Monday and Tuesday was approaching annoying by Wednesday and exasperating by Thursday.

Director of Ensuring the Future

There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized thinking and real-life problem solving.

Oh no. A leaf blower. The easiest way to witness the easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of all humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake.