Quotes About Progress

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.

Changing our genes in order to improve our lives and to facilitate further improvements is no different in this regard from augmenting our skin with clothes or our eyes with telescopes.

In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.

They are 'universal constructors'.

The art and culture that is New York, communications, finance, all these things help make up New York. The rest of the country should be happy that we are what we are.

Of the Wobblies, most probably, but not just them. Of hope, perhaps, that her country might rise to the challenge, might override the legacies of slavery, Indian slaughters, and tenement squalor and actually place itself at the forefront of human progress.

First initiative, then life.

Without the rule of law there could be no safety and no progress: if you created something, somebody else might just take it away because they wanted it.

Another thing done, is another thing done!

To have hope is to judge the present as inadequate while holding the audacity that an unrealized future will somehow improve upon the present.

My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.

The great expanding centre of 'inner Britain', London, did not build ships but it built aeroplanes, it did not mine coal but it made electrical equipment, it did not grow food but it did process it – into beer, refined sugar, Horlicks and Mars bars. It made tyres, Hoovers, films.

The history of invention is not the history of a necessary future to which we must adapt or die, but rather of failed futures, and of futures firmly fixed in the past.

I don't care how famous a guitarist is, he ain't learned everything. There's always somewhere to go, something to mash up, but he ain't found it yet. You never learn everything on that guitar neck.

Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.

Some of the steps you take may end up being detours or out-and-out mistakes. By staying focused on your vision, though, you'll find even those steps useful in the creating process.

Playing safe is often the riskiest thing you can do in a career. If you stand still, the odds are overwhelming that the world will leave you behind.

You make trannie yet, joey." I

Science cannot promise eternal truths; only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation of an aspect of reality

Forward movement is not helpful if what is needed is a change of direction.

I think capitalism is a good thing. The only problem with capitalism is that it destroys the planet, and that it's based on growth. I mean apart from those two little details it's got a lot to be said in its favour.

Although she didn't know what to say. She was under the impression that she was going to have to go back and start again at zero, even relearn language. Maybe in the end all of them had been right to force her to socialize a bit, to force her to wash, dress, entertain. Her

Charm took effect, and even progressed. Markus came out of it elegantly. He was smiling with his least Swedish smile possible, almost a kind of Spanish smile. He strung out some tasty anecdotes, skillfully mixed in cultural and personal references, successfully managed transitions from the intimate to the general. He gracefully unfurled a fine piece of engineering known as "man of the world.

Deambulando por aquella ciudad a un tiempo moderna y llena de cicatrices del pasado, había asumido que era posible dejar atrás los destrozos, no olvidándolos sino aceptándolos. Era posible construir una felicidad sobre un telón de fondo compuesto por sufrimientos. Pero resultaba más fácil decirlo que vivirlo y los seres humanos disponían de menos tiempo que las ciudades para volver a edificarse a sí mismos.