Quotes About Progress

We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events.

We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future.

The past had no hold on him. Perhaps that's why his vision of the future was so strong. Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly? You

Six months ago a miraculous story had burst wildly and messily into the Swan; today it was neatened, pressed, and put away without a crease in it.

Set the highest example. Remember, no one ever did anything absolutely right. Perfection is impossible, but striving for perfection is not. You have the power to do that.

Never make the same mistake twice. You are your best critic!

The only good thing about the good old days is they're gone.

Makes you wonder. When I left St. Louis, I was making five dollars a night. Now I'm getting $5,000 a week — for saying the same things out loud I used to say under my breath.

Every door of racial prejudice I can kick down, is one less door that my children have to kick down.

No matter how little a man may add to the fund of human knowledge it's worth the doing, for it's by little bits that we've learned to know so much of our old world.

The future is always unpredictable, but one trend seems clear. God is the future, and atheism is on its way out.

The Republican abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had once denounced the founding as a hideous compromise with slavery, came to understand the accomplishment of the framers. "Abolish slavery tomorrow," he said, "and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered.

Let the sun be proud of its achievement." He added, "It is evident that white and black 'must fall or flourish together.' In the light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion ought to be repealed . . . and every right, privilege, and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color.

Consequently, it was Democrats who, from the 1860s through the 1960s, prevented blacks as a group from enjoying their rights through political opposition and violent acts of terror. Democrats now claim credit for allowing blacks to have the civil rights that they themselves violently prevented for a hundred years.

The first communications revolution gave us the railroads, the car and the airplane; the second one has given us the computer, the internet and the iPhone. Of course, these transformations bring a whole new range of products in their wake. Do you watch Hulu? Read on a Kindle? Find your way with GPS? Shop on Amazon? Listen to Spotify? Get to the airport with Lyft or Uber? Book with Airbnb? Use Instagram? If so, you are a beneficiary of twenty-first-century technological capitalism.

America is founded on the understanding that wealth can be created through innovation and enterprise. Through the system of technological capitalism, we can go from ten marbles to twenty marbles without taking anyone's marbles.

Vanderbilt, Hill, the Wright brothers—these are the American pioneers. They

a boat, even a wrecked and wretched boat still has all the possibilities of moving

What I'd really hate would be the settled feeling, with nothing but happiness to look forward to.

But I am not quite Jane Austen yet and there are limits to what I can stand.

It has been said that once the mind has been expanded by an idea or concept, it can never return to its original way of thinking.

No perfection... more experience. As soon as you reach perfection it is not perfect anymore because you want to try something different.

Bad times don't last long. It's all about how you look at the situation. You can either get stuck in that shit or move past it. It's good that you pushing through.

Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)