Quotes About Progress

It's always time to question what has become standard and established.

Tomorrow belongs to those who hear it coming.

An dem Tag, an dem du denkst, du kannst nicht mehr besser werden, fängst du an, immer den gleichen Song zu spielen.

Every time humans discovered a new resource, or technique for using mass and energy, one side effect has always been pollution. Why should the information age be any different from those of coal, petroleum, or the atom?

Other generations perceived a plethora of swords hanging over their heads. But generally what they feared were shadows, for neither they nor their gods could actually end the world. Fate might reap an individual, a family, or even a whole nation, but not the entire world. Not then. We, in the mid-twenty-first century, are the first to look up at a sword we ourselves forged, and know, with absolute certainty, it is real...

The notion of a universe filled with cowards... who stay cowardly FOREVER, no matter how advanced they become... seems no[t] only unimaginative and temporally myopic, but deeply dismal, as well.

Your faith in Homo technologicus -the Tinkering Man- has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

All I ask is Ã¢â'¬Â¦ ponder with open minds. We've made so many mistakes, humanity, during just one lifetime. Many of them perpetrated not by evildoers, drenched in malice, but by men and women filled with fine motives! Like you.

The health of an enlightened and progressive society is measured by how vibrant is its science fiction, since that is where true self-critique and appraisal and hope lie.

If only I were equipped with better organs! Weren't we supposed to be getting deep bio-upgrades by the time I hit fifty? Why is the future always Ã¢â'¬Â¦ in the future?

one by Alasdair Gray – relayed by my colleague, author Ken McLeod[143] – that sums everything so-concisely and optimistically, but with a slightly science-fictional flair: "Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.

By one way of reckoning, we transformed several hundred cubic kilometers of fossil fuels into two cubic kilometers of human beings.

I may not ever be able to be certain what is absolutely True... but I sure as heck can work to find out what isn't true!  Moreover, I can improve my model of the world, by slowly, carefully finding out what is truer than what I already know.

Nothing is beyond us, the new legends say. So choose well.

Always, before, whenever one culture went into decline, there were others ready to take up the slack. If Rome toppled, there was light shining in Constantinople, then the Baghdad Caliphate and in China. If Philippine Spain turned repressive, Holland welcomed both refugees and science. When most of Europe went mad, in the mid–twentieth century, the brightest minds moved to America. When America grew self-indulgent and riven by new civil war, that migration sloshed and shifted East.

And yet we've flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations.

And yet we've flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations. One moment there are these barefoot Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass. Turn around, and their children's children talk about tapping energy from pulsars.

Why is the future always Ã¢â'¬Â¦ in the future?

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

Psychology often presents individuals as if they are frozen in time and space, describing their score on an intelligence or personality test, how they remember or what their inner conflicts are. All imply that people are fixed and that a description of them at one point in time will inevitably be true of them at another.

It seems to me that all our endless failures are adding up to a magnificent success. It's just not what we had in mind. It's real.

As an anonymous wit is supposed to have put it: Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.

Big History is the story of how you and I came to be.