Quotes About Progress

Rouche era fatto così, era costantemente in ritardo sulla versione migliore di se stesso.

La vida avanzaba para los demás, mientras que a mí siempre me dejaba de lado, yo permanecía bloqueado en la edad de las cosas inmóviles. Mi vida sexual se parecía a una película sueca. A veces sin subtítulos incluso.

Dan's use of two-stage exams kills two birds with one stone. Firstly, he maximises learning by ensuring that the exam itself is a learning experience. Second, in doing so, he makes clear that the grade is less important than the learning. Two-stage exams have not yet 'taken off' around the world, and grades remain the key outcome of most exams for most students. Dan, though, has taken advantage of his position in a graduate university environment to push the idea forward.

The first key idea is that when you have a challenge for which measuring progress is hard, the ability to adapt is just as important as the ability to plan.

growing. It's growing daily." He detailed the large sums of hush money

America is closer to the year 2 than anywhere else on earth.

Almost every night I say, "I wish I had done much better,

They had none of the modern things that we have today, and yet they turned their world upside down,

Growth, unlike aging, is not an automatic consequence of

Star Trek was about social justice from day one -- the stories were about the human pursuit for a better world, a better way of being, the next step up the ladder of sentience. The stories weren't about who we were going to fight, but who we were going to make friends with. It wasn't about defining an enemy -- it was about creating a new partnership. That's why when Next Gen came along, we had a Klingon on the bridge.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society—its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its key institutions—rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time. —Peter Drucker

If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.

History, in Renaissance Europe of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, was not a story of progress. It was largely a series of disasters.

If I'm not constantly being met by challenges that I am overcoming, how do I know that I'm capable?

How inevitable, really, were the type of governments we have today, with their particular fusion of territorial sovereignty, intense administration and competitive politics? Was this really the necessary culmination of human history?

Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we're wrong, we might well get a lot closer.

A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization

The one thing we can be confident of is that history is not over, and that wherever the most exciting new ideas of the next century come from, it will almost certainly be from someplace we don't expect.

Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening.

Why the West Rules – For Now

End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

Thanks to technology, we are probably as productive in two days as we previously were in five. But thanks to greed and some busy-bee syndrome of productivity, we are still asked to slave away for the profit of others ahead of our own nonremunerated ambitions. Whether

We already know how this one goes. Humans were once living a 'fairly comfortable life', subsisting from the blessings of Nature, but then we made our most fatal mistake. Lured by the prospect of a still easier life - of surplus and luxury, or living like gods - we had to go and tamper with hat harmonious State of Nature, and thus unwittingly turned ourselves into slaves.