Quotes About Progress

there are so many ways to move forward and only one way to stand still.

Why do people always talk about how fast a car can get from naught to sixty? I mean, what's the big deal about sixty miles an hour? It's like people think aliens are going to land and only be able to do fifty-nine. They'll suck out our brains unless we can do naught to sixty in less than ten seconds.

He told me we had to "move forward," which is a term that I've never understood. The planet turns. Time passes. We move forward even when we're standing still.

life is about getting the next footstep right.

The world is getting faster just as I'm getting slower. I can't keep up so I've stopped trying.

And we're going to be here for fifty years, so whatever is not right, we'll get right.

Achievers are not afraid of failure but the fear of not starting.

What's important is growth and spirituality. Well, that's broad, you may say. It's really not. Growth is constant and never-ending improvement in life. If you don't think, you don't grow. If you don't take action, you don't grow. If you don't expand your mind, you won't get to the next level.

Don't take too much comfort in the fact that you're successful today because tomorrow could bring failure. There's no surety in life.

The day we stop learning is the day we die.

And once begun, change cannot be reversed.

I learned that it ruled by creating classes and dividing people, by making some better than others." "Hasn't it always been that way?" Josh asked. "Every civilization is divided…." "Not every civilization," Virginia snapped. "Only the so-called advanced ones.

Today, we are able to do what your parents would would have dismissed as impossible and your grandparents as nothing short of magical.

El día en que dejamos de aprender es el día en que morimos.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. —ISAAC ASIMOV, THE RELATIVITY OF WRONG, 1989

I argue that most of the moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces, and that the most important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason, terms that I use in the broadest sense to mean reasoning through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true through empirical verification.

The witch theory of causality, and how it was debunked through science, encapsulates the larger trend in the improvement of humanity through the centuries by the gradual replacement of religious supernaturalism with scientific naturalism.

Most conservatives today are more liberal than most liberals were in the 1950s.

Man is, in short, 'perfectible'—meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection.

Computer scientists calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the singularity—the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything we can imagine that they will appear nearly infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience.

the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."3 It was one of the greatest speeches of Dr. King's career

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry succeeded alchemy, probability theory displaced luck and fortune, insurance attenuated anxiety, banks replaced mattresses as the repository of people's savings, city planning reduced the risks from fires, social hygiene and the germ theory dislodged disease, and the vagaries of life became considerably less vague.