Quotes About Progress

At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.

We are not merely passive pawns of historical forces; nor are we victims of the past. We can shape and direct history.

Cut the umbilical cord to yesterday. Although we can't change history, we change the effect the past has on the future.

The great thing about history is that it is adaptable.

Technological change can become 'fetishized' as a 'thing in itself', as an exogenous guiding force in the history of capitalism.

The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds, as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.

To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future.

We are not just studying human history, we are shaping it.

The lesson of history is that no one learns.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

Maxwell's Equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

In reality, American girls are among the most outspoken, ambitious, successful girls in the history of the human race.

It will be one of the tragedies of Christian history if future historians record that at the height of the twentieth century the church was one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.

The past is history, the future's a mystery.

Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?

We are at a punctuation point in human history where the Industrial Age and institutions have finally come to their logical conclusion. They have essentially run out of gas.

History is written backwards but lived forwards.

All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

We care too much about what happens to be there as a result of history. I worry even more that we care too much for the past and not enough for the present and the near present.