Quotes About Progress

It was possible to borrow British technology, and increasingly governments began to promote development. By the end of the nineteenth century, governments and large banks were actively managing industrial change.

Addicts know the voices in their heads can't be trusted, and that is precisely why there are so many of us out there in the ultra marathon community, moving forward one step at a time. And that's what Nico and I did—one step followed by another until we got to Hope Pass.

Its not how you start your life its how you finish it

The future?' came the voice sadly...'And do we really pass anything on to the future, except mirrors of ourselves? What if the future is as painful as the past?' 'That we can never know,'answered the wolf angrily. 'That's for the future. But what we can know is the importance of what we owe the present. Here and now...What we owe to ourselves, and to those we're bound to. And we can at least hope to make a better future, for everything.

Magic and new technology have always walked hand in hand - even back in the days of Robert Houdin.

We can have an American president who does not govern with negativism and fear of the future.

On my regularly scheduled days, I made sure to free up as much time and mind-space as I could for thinking. If you haven't gotten serious about tightening up your calendar, now is the time to start. Do you really need all those meetings? Are there ways to minimize the length of essential meetings and still make progress?

You learn more by reading more. I'm living proof that the more you learn, the more you earn.

I see technology as being an extension of the human body.

Long live the New Flesh!

Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it's inevitable that it should come home to roost.

Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn't turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self—garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn't turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self – garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.

Old attitudes die hard, of course, and there will still be those who mourn the passing of the days when a single accent ruled the British airwaves. But they are a steadily shrinking minority.

Truth and beauty are closely related but not the same. You're never sure that you have the truth. All you're doing is striving towards better and better truths and the light that guides you is beauty.

Every moment waited is a moment wasted....

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.

objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within! It begins as conjecture, and is then corrected by repeated cycles of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our 'wall'.

history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What