Quotes About Progress

Thirty million bricks were needed for the project, of which two and a half million had already been ordered.

By midday on 19 October, only nine of his ships had managed to clear the harbour.

He had advanced so rapidly that for eight days in a row he had never once taken off his boots.

The fleet lost momentum and for several vital days lay almost becalmed, scarcely moving at all.

Whatever the committee decided, it would take time for the towers to be built.

Almost a mile to the north, the Victory was still short of the enemy line,

the technology existed.

He could even have come by air, as individual balloonists already had.

So an invasion fleet it was, and the work continued

There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement.

It's the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people's behavior and shape their perceptions.

The connection between doing and knowing is breaking down.

When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that "the art of remembering is the art of thinking," he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it's well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine.

We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. 'Writing and print and the computer,' writes Walter Ong, 'are all ways of technologizing the word'; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.

Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.

The generation effect requires precisely the kind of struggle that automation seeks to alleviate.

To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly

the Web transformed the Internet from an intellectual meeting-house into a commercial enterprise.

Google, says its CEO, is more than a mere business; it is a "moral force.

We are soon to have everywhere," wrote one futurist, "smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonators, sterilizers of water, air, food, and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads, and subways.

Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing.

In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form.

The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment.