Quotes About Progress

We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology. That, in a nutshell, is how we have lurched into the early twenty-first century."9

E. O. Wilson has summarized it in his book The Social Conquest of Earth, we exist with a bizarre combination of "Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

expecting to find good twenty-first-century economic answers in a constitution that dates back to 1789 is unrealistic. The Founding Fathers were clever, to be sure, but the cleverest thing they realized is that Thomas Jefferson's famous aphorism that "the earth belongs to the living" means laws from a premodern age should not blindly bind us today.

I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization."5

Come Senators, Congressmen, Please heed the call, Don't stand in the doorways, Don't block up the halls…For the times they are a changin'.

The article...It's theme was that computers are the first technological invention in history that effect every aspect of human life, from psychological to entertainment to intelligence to material comfort to evil, and that, because of this, humans and machines will continue to grow closer together. (Article 'Life In The Blue Nowhere') From The Blue Nowhere.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.

Lefty, who'd been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it. Desdemona, having no alternative, followed.

Martinis in a can, Callie. We live in an age of wonders.

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of assembly line.

And all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / and to die is different from that anyone supposed, and luckier.

The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure.

The sonogram didn't exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.

that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.

The Parks Department continued to cut down trees, removing a sick elm to save the remaining twenty, then removing another to save the remaining nineteen, and so on and so on until only the half-tree remained in front of the Lisbons' old house. Nobody could bear to watch when they came for it (Tim Winer compared the tree to the last speaker of Manx)

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913.

A terrible thing happens when you water-ski. After you release the rope, you keep skimming over the water for a while, free. But there comes an inevitable moment when your speed fails to sustain your forward progress. The surface of the water breaks like glass. The depths open up to claim you. That was how I felt on land, watching the Object ski past. That same plunging, hopeless feeling, that emotional physics.

Úgy döntött, hogy nem ragadhat le, élni kell tovább.

Though history is being made today, we all need to try and comprehend the years of effort by many people involved in the eventual lunar landing.

For Ginsburg, the #MeToo movement is a vindication of the vision of feminism that she championed in the 1970s: a rejection of the traditional idea that women and men occupy separate spheres in which women are naturally passive and men aggressive; an attack on laws treating men and women differently, especially those designed to protect "the weaker sex"; and an insistence that special benefits for women be extended to men.