Quotes About Progress

Even these bad experiences are serving a purpose, don't you see?

We are shaped more by our failures than our successes (paraphrase)

She looks at me and smiles in that brisk efficient way. A modern professional smile. the kind of smile that never existed before, say, the telephone.

If we keep going in a straight line we'll get out of here. Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles.

After all, we aren't just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us.

Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try . . .

Get out of your comfort zone and into your discomfort zone. That's where real change begins.

The point of an exemplar is not that he or she is to be emulated, but that this person, in virtue of being farther along a path you aspire to go down, somehow understands you better than you understand yourself—at least at the beginning.

the past is important to learn from, but not to live in. The future is important for your direction but not to be so consumed in that you can't enjoy the present.

You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.

The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong.

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.

time always erodes advantage.

Gross Domestic Product—the substitution, in effect, of ideas for physical value.

Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out.

Connecting products to the Web will be the 21st century electrification.

In 1850, there were only eight graduate students in the entire United States.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.