Quotes About Progress

all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous:

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

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen.

In reality, there's every reason to believe that farming 'reached' California just as soon as it reached anywhere else in North America. It's just that (despite a work ethic that valorized strenuous labour, and a regional exchange system that would have allowed information about innovations to spread rapidly) people there rejected the practice as definitively as they did slavery.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Tsiolkovsky's most well-known quote expresses this sentiment: "The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one does not stay in the cradle forever." Awakenings

We are already behaving differently from that bacterial colony in a petri dish, deviating from the fatal S-curve, using our limited but growing global cognitive capacities to anticipate and soften or avoid the crash. We are waking up, and we can see the trends starting to turn. We are slowly rounding the corner on the related problems of poverty and overpopulation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,

the number of dirigibles made per year has not increased according to this pattern. The average number of cats per household has not increased exponentially. This made, briefly, for a fun game. It's not too hard to come up with metrics that have not kept pace with the Great Acceleration. Yet, in the end, this exercise in contrarian thinking only reinforces the point: any set of meaningful measures will reveal the same pattern. Venus

cities will be smarter, greener places. Over the centuries, we've made a lot of progress in learning how to urbanize. We invented plumbing and sanitation systems, learned not to stain our cities brown with coal ash, realized we don't want polluted urban rivers. We are still learning how to live well in cities. I bet twenty-second-century cities will be nice places to live. Our

Okay, engineering is not quite the right word, as it implies some larger degree of understanding than we have. We are perhaps engineering Earth only in the way that your infant is "engineering" your home media system when she sticks cookies in the DVD slot.

These disturbances are the product of our human propensity to explore in teams, to develop new tools to expand our domain to places that are not part of our "natural" habitat.

early twentieth century seemed to see what was coming. In 1873, Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani proposed that the growing influence of humans was causing the "Anthropozoic era," but this was largely ignored by scientists of his day. In 1877, physiologist Joseph LeConte described a similar concept, calling it the Psychozoic era. In the 1920s the French Jesuit priest Tielhard de Chardin spoke of

Around six thousand to seven thousand years ago, sea level stabilized after a multithousand-year period of rapid rise. The first large coastal settlements on several continents all date to this period. The high-protein fish diets made possible by stable sea level and consequent coastal settlement contributed to the rise of complex societies around the world. In

My experience has taught me that success comes not to those who swing for the fences every time at bat, but to those who commit themselves to a continuous program of constant improvement, base hit by base hit.

Success is as dangerous as failure,

Woodman, M. (1982) Addition to Perfection. Toronto: Inner City Books.

be simple and always take the next step. You needn't see it in advance, but you can look back at it afterwards. There is no "how" of life, one just does it.... It seems, however, to be terribly difficult for you not to be complicated and to do what is simple and closest to hand.... So climb down from the mountain of your humility and follow your nose. That is your way. 1

Judaism: A Modern Movement with an Ancient Past

14 But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by continuous exercise to distinguish good from evil.

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

Alexander Dow, his boss at Edison, who thought him immensely talented, tried to dissuade him. "Electricity, yes," Dow told Ford. "That's the coming thing. But gas—no.

In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.

the little things were not little things, because it was the accumulation of little things that made big things happen.

When one of the children of his friend Harvey Firestone boasted that he had some savings in the bank, Ford lectured the child. That money was idle. What the child should do, Ford said, was spend the money on tools. "Make something," he admonished. "Create something.