Quotes About Progress

In history it is wise to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans. Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope in a miracle.

Population growth disquiets the demographer only when he fears that it will impede economic progress or make it harder to feed the masses. But that man needs solitude, that human proliferation produces cruel societies, that distance is required between men so that the spirit might breathe, does not interest him. The quality of man does not matter to him.

Humanity will one day solemnly recall the events that initiated the dismantlement of the industrial society.

Wenn ein Reaktionär von "unvermeidlicher Restauration" spricht, dürfen wir nicht vergessen, dass der Reaktionär in Jahrtausenden rechnet.

The liberation promised by every invention ends with the growing submission of the man who adopts it to the man who manufactures it.

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope in a miracle. How can anyone live who does not hope for miracles?

De menselijke warmte in een samenleving wordt minder naar de mate waarin haar wetgeving volmaakter wordt.

Man no longer knows how to invent anything that does not serve to kill better or to make the world a little more vulgar.

Man emerges from the beast when he orders his instincts hierarchically.

The modern world is condemned precisely by all that with which modern man seeks to justify it.

History is less the evolution of humanity than the unfolding of facets of human nature.

The man who invents a new machine invents for humanity a new concatenation of new forms of servitude.

An age is civilized if it does not reserve intelligence for professional work.

Totalitarian society is the common name for the social species whose scientific name is industrial society. The embryo today allows us to foresee the adult animal's deformity.

In order to avoid a manly confrontation with nothingness, man erects altars to progress.

With the appearance of "rational" relations among individuals the process of a society's decay begins.

The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.

La técnica no cumple los viejos sueños del hombre, sino los remeda con sorna.

The modern world resulted from the confluence of three independent causal series: the demographic expansion, democratic propaganda, the industrial revolution.

The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.

Progress is the offspring of knowledge of nature. Faith in progress is the offspring of ignorance of history.

We disapprove of capitalism not because it promotes inequality, but because it favors the rise of inferior human types.

Modern man does not live in space and time, but in geometry and chronometry.

Between the dictatorship of technology and the technology of dictatorship, man no longer finds a crack through which he can slip away.