Quotes About Progress

First, I think the science of monetary economics has clearly gotten better.

looks promising and I've taken it up again on occasion. But whenever I did, I realized why I'd not carried on in the first place – in the same way that a specialist might say of a child, that one's not going to grow up right. I could tell that it wouldn't develop into a finished picture.

A plentiful supply of paper – just as much as the study of ancient sculpture or single-point perspective – was among the factors that led to what we call the Renaissance. It allowed artists to think and work in different ways, a transformation as significant as the Internet and computer technology have been in the early twenty-first century.

Education aims to give you a boost up the ladder of knowledge. Too often, it just gives you a cramp on one of its rungs.

The breakfast slimes, angel food cake, doughnuts and coffee, white bread and gravy cannot build an enduring nation.

The inertia hardest to overcome is that of perfectly good seconds.

A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums.

When you no longer know what headache, heartache, or stomachache means without cistern punctures, electrocardiograms and six x-ray plates, you are slipping.

Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice.

Physiology is the stepchild of medicine. That is why Cinderella often turns out the queen.

A sweating ovary or a sick prostate explains most history.

Standardization is the fertilizer of college education. A little may be useful, but flowers do not grow in pure manure.

A man may be born a jackass; but it is his business if he makes himself a double one.

Evolution is individual — devolution is collective.

The natural philosophers are mostly gone. We modern scientists are adding too many decimals.

Take a man out of the trenches, make him a straw boss, and he develops a belly.

Prize fighters can sometimes read and write when they start — but they can't when they finish.

It is not hard to learn more. What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong.

I find four great classes of students: The dumb who stay dumb. The dumb who become wise. The wise who go dumb. The wise who remain wise.

A feature of science is that as the frontiers of our knowledge are extended, new mysteries, just beyond the frontiers, come into sharper focus

Some innovations just don't attract enough economic or social demand: just as supersonic flight and manned space flight stagnated after the 1970s, today (in 2002) the potentialities of broadband (G3) technology are being taken up rather slowly because few people want to surf the Internet or watch movies from their mobile phones.

But orbital mechanics waits for no man,

leadership requires disturbing people—but at a rate they can absorb.

You appear dangerous to people when you question their values, beliefs, or habits of a lifetime. You place yourself on the line when you tell people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. Although you may see with clarity and passion a promising future of progress and gain, people will see with equal passion the losses you are asking them to sustain.