Quotes About Progress

We would note that ruins don't change a lot: what capacity for change is in a ruin has usually been exhausted in the considerable process of change undergone in order for the ruin to become a ruin. Once becoming a ruin, a ruin stays pretty much the same.

While Christopher Pike loved old Westerns, he'd also sampled stories set in other times. He'd noticed something: even as technological progress improved the lives of fictional characters, it had made the jobs of the storytellers who created them more difficult.

Life was like a cannon, Beld Yulan had always said. "You've got to clear the empty casings before you can fire again." As

Keep moving! Destroy barriers! See everything!

What impossible matter will he make easy next?

emancipation

What would bring the Confederacy to an inglorious end was the same thing that had so foolishly created it a rigidity of thought, a clinging to old ways, a refusal to adapt and change.

the problem, and our understanding of it, changes as we tackle it.

There is an old saying well begun is half done - 'tis a bad one. I would use instead, Not begun at all till half done; so according to that I have not begun my Poem and consequently (a priori) can say nothing about it.

Even while you read this, whole square miles of identical boxes are spreading like gangrene; developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch.

Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen

Apparently I am pushing a jinx about the streets. I am certain that I can do better with some other wagon. A new cart, a new start.

All signs were pointing upward; his wheel was revolving skyward.

In the five years that he had dedicated to this work, he had produced an average of only six paragraphs monthly. He could not even remember what he had written in some of the tablets, and he realized that several were filled principally with doodling. However, Ignatius thought calmly, Rome was not built in a day.

a block that had moved into the twentieth century carelessly and uncaringly—and with very limited funds.

Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss. By the time we had left the swamps and reached those rolling hills near Baton Rouge, I was getting afraid that some rural rednecks might toss bombs at the bus. They love to attack vehicles, which are a symbol of progress, I guess.

Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous.

To proclaim the need for new ideas has served, in some measure, as a substitute for them.

Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism.

dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.

You know what? I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive.

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all- plus c'est la meme, plus ca change.

How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?

The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.