Quotes About Progress

There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to.

The Revolution has got frozen up. They have frozen it up with their talk of moderation. To stand still in Revolution is to slip backwards.

In a generation everything can change.

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due.

Todos os rios correm para o mar, e o mar não se enche.

Thomas More still has some credit with the king. And he has written him a letter, saying," he manages to smile, "that I am Wycliffe, Luther and Zwingli rolled together and tied up in string—one reformer stuffed inside another, as for a feast you might parcel a pheasant inside a chicken inside a goose.

England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.

We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy—at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable. "The Theory of Ambition," an essay: JEAN-MARIE HÉRAULT DE SÉCHELLES

A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself? If I don't have it, at least the King of France doesn't either.

As for the future, the king's desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up.

You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.

He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy toward the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

Anne Cromwell sits with him, as the rain falls, and writes her beginner's Latin in her copy book. By St John's Day she knows all common verbs. She is quicker than her brother and he tells her so. 'Let me see,' he says, holding out his hand for her book. He finds that she has written her name over and over, 'Anne Cromwell, Anne Cromwell …

England needs roads, forts, harbours, bridges. Men need work. It's a shame to see them begging their bread, when honest labour could keep the realm secure. Can we not put them together, the hands and the task?

Reculer pour mieux sauter.

Bawling, strong, one hour old, plucked from the cradle: he kissed the infant's fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

he kissed the infant's fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children if each generation does not improve on what went before.

I can remember the days,' Mirabeau said, 'when we didn't have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing.

The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?