Quotes About Progress

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.

Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears that the solar system of stars.

Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile.

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us.

To determine to go and to say it was to be halfway there

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process.

The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. [ Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech ]

Let's get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let's close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life.

Someone's got to do these things,' he said sullenly. 'Or else fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.

Morning seems to come earlier every year I live.

Because time does the job, dynamite can't touch. (Samuel Hamilton)

You can't make a race horse of a pig." "No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig.

Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process [...] Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech [...] What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless

The little engine roared and then stopped. Adam sat back for a moment, limp but proud, before he got out. The postmaster looked out between the bars of his golden grill. I see you've got one of the damn things, he said. Have to keep up with the times, said Adam. I predict there'll come a time when you can't find a horse, Mr. Trask. Maybe so. They'll change the face of the countryside. They get their clatter into everything, the postmaster went on.

Your days are like pages, the chapters unread. You have to keep turning your book has no end.

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris