Quotes About Progress

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better.

We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.

we must always remember that the real content of evolution (biological as well as cultural) is the elaboration of new behaviour.

what we call cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagination.

There's a lot of trust being built up. I think we have a lot of work ahead of us.

Victory [over homophobia] may require five or maybe 20 years. Yet I have no doubt that "don't ask, don't tell" and same-sex adoption bans will be as unspeakable and inexplicable to my grandchildren as counting a slave as three-fifths of a human being.

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before

Un candado no puede ser abierto dos veces. Lo que se considera retorno no es tal. Nunca hay retorno. Hay avance o cambio. Lo que se piensa que es caída no lo es; el único que cae o que cree caer es el pensamiento de caer, nunca el ser.

initiatives.

At first I was always cast as the girlfriend. It was a long time before I got to play characters who were people.

Le fait est que, de renoncement en renoncement, Anne se sent depuis quelques temps devenir de plus en plus riche. C'est comme si chacun des espoirs, auxquels naguère elle se cramponnait, avait été une espèce d'amarre , la fixant et l'entravant; et, à chaque amarre rompue, ou bien lâchée, quelque chose en elle bascule, dérive, retrouve un meilleur équilibre. (p217)

Les vieilles habitudes sont comme une rigole creusée par l'eau, et qui, ensuite, en dirige le cours; et l'on répète les mêmes erreurs.

Life is like that. Destruction precedes emergence of something better. Destruction is not bad. It only feels that way.

Changing my own actions may not change the world, but it's a start.

if the way ahead is not clear, time is often the best editor of one's intentions.

Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out, something's gotta go and happen.

Someday somebody's going to come along and knock this old fence down.

I love that people think the world is even halfway ready for what we about to bring.

what is bad won't be bad forever, and what is good can sometimes last a long, long time.

Life...moves us through all the time changes. All kinds of changes. And we're made so that we roll and move with it. Sometimes somebody gets stuck in the present and the rolling stops—but the changing doesn't.

I didn't just appear one day. I didn't just wake up and know how to write my name. I keep writing, knowing now that I was a long time coming.

I want to write this down, that the revolution is like a merry-go-round, history always being made somewhere. And maybe for a short time, we're a part of that history. And then the ride stops and our turn is over.