Quotes About Progress

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

I seen turtles all my life. They're always goin' someplace. They always seem to want to get there.

You got to think about that day, an' then the nex' day. Jus' take ever' day.

Tu quello che puoi fare devi farlo lo stesso. L'importante,' diceva, 'è sapere che ogni volta che c'è un piccolo passo avanti, poi c'è pure una scivolata indietro, ma mai così indietro come prima. E' la differenza,' diceva, 'dimostra che quello che hai fatto era giusto farlo. E non era una perdita di tempo pure se magari sembrava di sì.

Man has become our greatest hazard, and our only hope.

People moving [...] Movin' cause they got to [...] Movin' cause they want sompin better'n what they got. An' that's the on'y way they'll ever git it.

Samuel smiled at him. "They say man lived in trees one time. Somebody had to get dissatisfied with a high limb or your feet would not be touching flat ground now.

Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything.

there must be a saturation point and the progress may be a progression toward strangulation.

Cand cauti inapoi cu atentie, poti gasi intotdeauna momentul de inceput al unei noi epoci, dupa care totul merge de la sine, se inlantuie.

To hell with that rotten century! 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. A man will have clean hands once we get the lid slammed shut on that stinking century. It's a fair thing ahead. There's no rot on this clean new hundred years. It's not stacked, and any bastard who deals seconds from this new deck of years— why, we'll crucify him head down over a privy.

Just set one day's work in front of the last day's work. That's the way it comes out. And that's the only way it does.

You're getting well," Samuel said. "Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But

This must be a good book," he wrote in Working Days on June 10, 1938. "It simply must. I haven't any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted—slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges.

It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world.

No. I won't want it ever. I would have been so happy if you could have given me—well, what your brother has—pride in the thing he's doing, gladness in his progress. Money, even clean money, doesn't stack up with that." His eyes widened a little and he said, "Have I made you angry, son? Don't be angry. If you want to give me a present—give me a good life. That would be something I could value.

There was a wall against learning. A man wanted his children to read, to figure, and that was enough. More might make them dissatisfied and flighty. And there were plenty of examples to prove that learning made a boy leave the farm to live in the city—to consider himself better than his father. Enough.

Ever'body's askin' that. 'What we comin' to?' Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

Our treasured and nostalgic picture of the village general store, the cracker-barrel store where an informed yeomanry gather to express opinions and formulate the national character, is very rapidly disappearing. People who once held family fortresses against wind and weather, against scourges of frost and drought and insect enemies, no cluster against the busy breast of the big town. (p 56)

The new American finds his challenge and his love in traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die.

rose like cream to the top of milk.

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

Nothing stops, Mac. If you were able to put an idea into effect tomorrow, it would start changing right away.