Quotes About Progress

The technical challenges were technical challenges that were not unbeatable; it was just that we had to learn how to do things and how to build a sensitive enough device. That took us 20 years after we built the first version of the LIGO detector.

If you are a human being in modern society on planet Earth, you need money to do pretty much everything, especially to grow into a more expansive version of yourself.

I wake up every morning trying to be a new, better person and version of myself. I never try and be the same thing. So that's what's going to be hard for girls to keep up with me, because I'm always ever-evolving my style.

The perfectibility of the human mind is a theme that has captured our imagination for centuries - the notion that, with the right tools, the right approach, the right attitude, we might become better, smarter versions of ourselves.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are building their own versions of the future. And they get bigger and bigger.

I think this is the most exciting time to be alive right now. We have a black president. There are transgender movies and media out there now. Gay characters are playing non-stereotypical versions of themselves. I feel like as a society, or in television at least, we're rising up. Even in society we're rising up.

I prefer stories about people who are, in a sense, trying to find better versions of themselves.

At Pixar, we do a million versions of the movie, and every one of them goes through their awkward teenage phase where it's terrible and doesn't make sense, and we just keep working on it.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

Over the past 50 years we got versions of X-ray specs and space vacations, and even death rays. But the X-ray specs don't fit on your face - they're big things that screen your luggage for guns. Space vacations are real, but they cost $20 million. We have death rays, but you have to be a triple Ph.D. to play with them.

Early versions of Microsoft Word left a lot to be desired. However, to the company's credit, it quickly learned where Word fell short, made the necessary changes, and repeatedly introduced new versions of the software.

Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don't have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.

It will not be a world of man versus machine. It will be a world of man plus machines.

When a handful of tech giants are gatekeepers to the world's data, it's no surprise that the debate about balancing progress against privacy is framed as 'pro-data and, therefore, innovation' versus 'stuck in the Dark Ages'.

While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.

Last year, at the beginning of the year, we couldn't get arrested, so I'll take this. Feast versus famine.

New media's not very old, hence the word new, so we don't know a lot of things about new media and by the time you've taught it it's probably out of date. I think it's much more beneficial to have an experiential lesson versus a classroom lesson in new media.

There are many people talking about access to space and, 'How can we make that cheaper? How can we turn that into a Southwest Airlines versus the big airlines?'

By the year 2040, the world's population is likely to increase by about 2 billion people, with also projected economic output will be up about 130 percent versus the year 2010.

To me, I will be a stronger person if I'm moving forward, doing the work I want, and continue to drive: force the purpose that I want to create versus doing what other people think I should be doing, which is never a way to live.

How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?

Ultimately, it's not going to be about man versus machine. It is going to be about man with machines.

I am still fairly confident we will come out better than the West in terms of our overall development versus damage.