Quotes About Progress

Learn to swim, and then swim. -John Lennon when asked, "What's the meaning of life?

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

There's more good music being made now than ever before.

Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature.

Presuming that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.

the ancient Greeks or Romans could have invented such a device; the technology wasn't beyond them. For all we know, someone at that time actually may have invented something similar and then abandoned it.

With the advent of recorded music in 1878, the nature of the places in which music was heard changed.

The technology is useful and convenient, but it has, in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the things it has never been able to capture or reproduce.

Everyone was doing that in their own way, rejecting things and moving on. It's just a part of discovering who you are; it's nothing special.

Creativity doesn't "improve.

that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.

I love the passing of time.

Things fall apart, it's scientific.

After the Berlin Wall came down I visited that city and I will never forget it. The abandoned checkpoints. The sense of excitement about the future. The knowledge that a great continent was coming together. Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union.

What Churchill described as the twin marauders of war and tyranny have been almost entirely banished from our continent. Today, hundreds of millions dwell in freedom, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, from the Western Approaches to the Aegean.

I knew they were mine because they became so in tiny steps across my soul.

new forms of contraception, new methods of child rearing, and new forms of education and public welfare have provoked a fundamental renegotiation of gender roles.

Innovation ensured that each cycle normally reached a higher level than its predecessor, but innovation was normally too slow to prevent an eventual collapse within each cycle, as populations outstripped available resources.

Increasing global inequalities fueled resistance to Western values. In 1960 the wealthiest 20 percent of the world's population earned about thirty times as much as the poorest 20 percent; in 1991 the wealthiest 20 percent earned sixty-one times as much. The successes of the most highly industrialized

The modern era is the briefest but most turbulent of the three main eras of human history. Whereas the era of foragers lasted more than 200,000 years and the agrarian era about 10,000 years, the modern era has lasted just 250 years. Yet during this brief era change has been more rapid and more fundamental than ever before; indeed, populations have grown so fast that 20 percent of all humans may have lived during just these two and a half centuries.

Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2007). The world: A history. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Brown, C. S. (2007). Big history: From the Big Bang to the present. New York: The New Press.

Between 1750 and 2000 the number of human beings increased from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.)

as Joel Mokyr has argued, technological innovation is unlikely to happen quickly where those who work lack wealth, education, and prestige, and those who are wealthy, educated, and have prestige know nothing about productive work.