Quotes About Progress

Everything that is great in life is the product of slow growth; the newer, and greater, and higher, and nobler the work, the slower is its growth, the surer is its lasting success. Mushrooms attain their full power in a night; oaks require decades. A fad lives its life in a few weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries. If you are sure you are right, do not let the voice of the world, or of friends, or of family swerve you for a moment from your purpose.

the true competition is the competition of the individual with himself—his present seeking to excel his past.

We envy the success of others, when we should emulate the process by which that success came.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003

We see in order to move; we move in order to see.

I think it is totally wrong and terribly harmful if education is defined as acquiring knowledge.

I think education is both using and improving knowledge and that changes the whole picture.

As we brew, we must bake

a timid reverence for the decisions of our ancestors, as if it were the nature of the mind always too degenerate and never to advance.

The waste of capital, in proportion to the total capital, in this country between 1800 and 1850, in the attempts which were made to establish means of communication and transportation, was enormous.

The idea of the "free man," as we understand it, is the product of a revolt against mediaeval and feudal ideas; and

We cannot now stir a step in our life without capital. We cannot build a school, a hospital, a church, or employ a missionary society, without capital, any more than we could build a palace or a factory without capital. We

Social improvement is not to be won by direct effort. It is secondary, and results from physical or economic improvements. That

What have our ancestors been striving for, under the name of civil liberty, for the last five hundred years? They have been striving to bring it about that each man and woman might live out his or her life according to his or her own notions of happiness and up to the measure of his or her own virtue and wisdom. How

Every improvement in education, science, art, or government expands the chances of man on earth. Such expansion is no guarantee of equality. On

Capital, however, as we have seen, is the force by which civilization is maintained and carried on. The

The reason why man is not altogether a brute is, because he has learned to accumulate capital, to use capital, to advance to a higher organization of society, to develop a completer co-operation, and so to win greater and greater control over Nature.

I've been doing a lot of learning from mistakes, first and foremost, and building off that.

Hang out with people who are better than you and you cannot help but improve." Pabrai acts on this advice to a degree that would horrify many people. "When I meet someone for the first time, I evaluate them afterwards and say, 'Will it make me better or worse to have a relationship with this person?'" If the answer is worse, he says, "I'll cut him out.

They sought to answer such questions as What is the intended destination for this business in ten or twenty years? What must management be doing today to raise the probability of arriving at that destination? And what could prevent this company from reaching such a favorable destination?

Thou art translated into the kingdom of Christ, but thou art a great way from his court. That