Quotes About Progress

After twenty-six months on Jacob's Ladder, her fear has largely faded

This country is ours. America is over. Arcadia is rising in its place.

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

who knew that humanity would one day reach childhood's end, who believed intellect could triumph over superstition and ignorance, and who dared to dream.

all goes well, he will be done with the job before the day ends, and then be on his way.

Already he knew the future. He was making it.

ameliorated

Believe me, you still have a long way to fall, a very long way.

When a society erases its past, for whatever reason," she said, "it cannot have a future.

We grow, we change, we labor to maturity, to what little wisdom we might ever acquire, but always in the mirror is who we were as well as who we are, a harking back and, yet again, a quiet reckoning.

A few thousand years of weather will eventually reduce a city to its component elements and fields of rubble, though its more restive citizens are likely to get the job done faster.

Ray Kurzweil

Our illusion is that we travel through life on a calculated and straight trajectory, from the past through present into future, on a journey to understanding, truth, reward. But by Brownian movement we progress, sent angling off this way and that by the impact of everyone we meet and every event that we cannot foresee.

Every period of enlightenment is followed by a new and more efficient barbarism. They preach the necessity of truth even as they flee from it. Some believe in immortality through

heads east, from which every tomorrow always comes.

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. 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.

TUESDAY, 30 DECEMBER

Because we have free will, our tomorrows are never determined until we make them day by day.

If there's nothing to learn because we know it all, what's the challenge, why would the effort matter, what would be the point.

politicians were tearing down a thousand years of civilization brick by brick but weren't building anything to replace it.

Technology changes nothing. People were people before and after the steam engine, before and after the airplane. But Ã¢â'¬Â¦ not quite now. Walls. That's what it is. The problem is walls.

perhaps a sea again, or a jungle, because all things pass.

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing. We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. 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.

so perhaps in our postmodern rejection of the past, we cast aside more wisdom than ignorance.