Quotes About Progress

Once you're halfway home, you know that you can probably get the rest of the way there.

At the end of the day, all you can hope for is to go on. The older I get, the more I realize that just keeping on keeping on is what life's all about.

What is clear is that genius, whether it is represented by a Thomas Edison or an Albert Einstein or an Alberto Ramirez, leaves the world a better place.

An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass.

Never despise meger beginings!

You can't let your past write the future

True heroes and ideas never fall in the final sense of the word. They can only encounter temporary setbacks in their difficult journey to progress and success."

When you have completed 95 percent of your journey, you are only halfway there.

the 21st Century is really a terrible time to be a control freak.

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.

My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.

All human societies contain inventive people. It's just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.

Gay marriage won't be more of an issue 25 years from now than interracial marriage is today.

Doing things is not the same as getting things done.

They must listen to the words of Booker T. Washington, the former slave who went on to found Tuskeegee Institute: No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced regardless of his own merit or efforts.1337

Americans still say integration is important, but very few do anything to bring it about.

By 12th grade, the average black or Hispanic is reading and doing math at the level of the average white 8th-grader. 38

Another Harvard research project concluded bluntly that by 2004, American schools were just as segregated as they were in 1969, the year after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

By 1997, when Kansas City finally gave up, it had the most extravagant schools in the country, but the percentage of whites was lower than ever and blacks' test scores had not budged.

In some cases, blacks may have quickly caught up with the mainstream, but all too often they did not. What might have been intended as a temporary relaxation of standards hardened into permanent racial preferences. The gap in black/white achievement refused to go away, and what came to look more and more like reverse racial discrimination had to be justified by claiming that the persistent racial gap in achievement could be due only to persistent white racism.

Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), denounces the many black leaders who still blame whites for all the woes that befall blacks: With few exceptions, these leaders have failed to recognize or do not accept that the major impediments to black progress have been removed…. The major remaining impediments to the progress of black people today are the evils indigenous to the black community. This is the new civil-rights battleground….1035

Let's be honest about the fact that many of us from all races are racist. . . . We've lied about progress."132