Quotes About Progress

They're human beings, and the two things humans make are tools…and mistakes. But sometimes we get stuff right, too, and there are some really good models out there

all ensigns should be pruned back occasionally. It served them in good stead later.

I see you're closer to on time than usual!

There's no key to the universe, you just have to point your way in one direction, keep going, keep going, keep going, and see what happens.

We will remember, but we will also proceed forward, as we always have.

Although there can be fast improvements all over a book, it won't gel into a single cohesive life right away. Keep going, keep faith, because it can follow the reductive dynamic of a slow meat stock. You boil it down for fifty hours, and, sure, it distils mathematically, you can see it reducing and growing richer hour by hour. But flavour and texture don't gel until the last ten minutes. Always simmer your work until then.

Now, 2.6 million years after we started making tools, the last 0.016 per cent of our history as produced the most change, an exponential curve turning vertical. It's why I keep saying 'a recent idea' to anything less than a couple of centuries old. That change is young, its paint is still wet. And it's still external, due to mechanisation and its effects, it hasn't really changed humans except to make the affluent fat—and by affluent I mean anyone who shits in good drinking water.

If you can't run, then walk. And if you can't walk, then crawl. Do what you have to do. Just keep moving forward and never, ever give up.

On the Road that I have taken, one day walking I awaken, amazed to see where I've come, where I'm going, where I'm from.

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.

What has been is no more. Change has come.

it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.

What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life.

When you start life as a tumor with a brain, there's no where to go but up.

in a world where McDonald's now sells salads with low-fat dressing, anything is possible.

The process, not the final achievement, is what it's all about.

Besides, I can't get to where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. I've got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can - that's how I buy the ticket to where I want to be.

what makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection. BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON Chapter 27 Page 214

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing. We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it presents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

Don't look back, something may be gaining on you.

That's life. Something always happens. We don't live in stasis, frozen in amber.

A city is half beast and half machine, with arteries of fresh water and veins of foul, nerves of telephone and electrical cables, sewer lines for bowels, pipes full of pressurized steam and others carrying gas, valves and fans and filters and meters and motors and transformers and tens of thousands of interlinked computers, and though its people sleep, the city never does.

A high degree of intelligence yes in no other creature in the natural world. That's why nature shuns us and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering chaos and ultimately to annihilation.