Quotes About Progress

This is 1987. A girl can be whatever she wants to be." "I know," said Ray. "My mums a plumber.

So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.

we merely say that man is continually developing new forms of insight, which are clear up to a point and then tend to become unclear. In this activity, there is evidently no reason to suppose that there is or will be a final form of insight (corresponding to absolute truth)

T]here is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order."17

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

If it works, it's out of date.

If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.

The best time to act on this was decades ago. The second best time is now.

Change is the very fabric of our time.

where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.

The village is coming back, like it or not.

We aren't a curse upon the world. We are her new eyes. Her brain, testes, ovaries . . . her ambition and her heart. Her voice. So sing. (556)

As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.

Your personal growth as a leader will be directly tied to your ability to give and receive feedback.

New is America's oldest tradition.

Flourishing depends on unconscious skills that serve as a pre-requisite for conscious accomplishments.

Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.

The people we admire the most are rooted in nature, but have surpassed nature.

I don't think we were built to be safe," he said. "I think we were built to try things.

Justice William 0. Douglas once told President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Any government bureau more than ten years old should be abolished, because after that it becomes more concerned with its image than with its mission.

Most great products have been made over the dead bodies of experts.

No matter how much he accomplished he would always raise his standards slightly higher, and then he'd feel miserable.

We're all designers now. It's time to get good at it.