Quotes About Progress

The fabulous boom of the late 199os produced modest to no income gains for most Americans.

We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.

Scientists used to think that whatever the very early universe might have been like, given sufficient time and some luck, intelligent life forms would eventually evolve somewhere. As a result of discoveries over the last fifty years or so, we now know that that assumption was wrong; in fact, quite the opposite is true.

History is a warning to ourselves, and only by remembering where we have been and how low we have fallen can we know to where we aspire,

We're coming! She felt like shouting it to the sky. We're on our way!

There is no standing still, Life goes on, and is always bringing forth its Realities, which Way soever it goeth.

The poetry of each age may be considered as vitally connected with, and as vividly reflective of, its character and progress, as either its politics or its religion.

The latest edition of a work of science is the most valuable; of literature, the earliest.

What matters, though, is not the space you're put in to work; what matters is the work you do in it. The Manhattan Project, the World War II race to develop the atomic bomb, also started out under a football stadium. Beneath the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a team of physicists led by Enrico Fermi built a crude fission reactor, brought its uranium fuel to critical mass, and set off a chain reaction that changed the world. We

Every marvel of our age arose out of the critical give and take of an open society. No other civilization ever managed to incorporate this crucial innovation, weaving it into daily life. And if you disagree with this ... say so!

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England.

William Makepeace Thackeray

With what a leaden and retarding weight Does expectation load the wing of time!

If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

Schumacher posited that people must make a serious shift in what they consider to be wealth and progress: "Ever-bigger machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever-greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom.

As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species' roles in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

product of service. Instead

one small decision has the power to make a real difference for the economy

Dow Chemical has experimented with this concept in Europe, and DuPont is taking up this idea vigorously.

Swiss textile mill Röhner. We

A caricature of this result," Butterfield adds, "is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority—a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion."14

The speckled moth changes its wing coloring; bacteria develop drug resistance. Why should this count in favor of the thesis that whales are derived from ungulates, or men from fish?