Quotes About Progress

In the second century of the Christian Aera

And Star Trek is not an action TV series. It's about a lot more than that

A future where people worked together and utilized science and reason and logic to try and solve problems, instead of just blowing things up.

Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—

Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests

To enable man to understand the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual function of history.

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?

History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere.

That was my lesson. I needed to act differently.

So I started trying to behave as if my defects of character were gone. I considered how I would behave if I were who I wanted to be, and I acted that way to the best of my poor acting ability. I made lots of mistakes along the way, but I began to improve with time. It was hard.

The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973 and remnants of that categorization remain in the contemporary diagnosis of 'gender identity disorder', particularly when applied to children.

Today's common sense had a habit of turning into tomorrow's utter nonsense.

It mattered only that those kind of chains were gone and that he had crawled out into the clearing and was able to stand up on his hind legs and look around and appreciate the difference between then and now, even on the awful Richmond days when the now came dressed as the then.

son los destinos individuales los que trazan el devenir de los grandes acontecimientos.

Supongo que la gente no ha parado de alterar las normas desde que los griegos inventaron la democracia o, incluso, desde que el hombre inventó la rueda.

Del año 1696 recuerdo dos acontecimientos. Hacía unos años que se había trazado una nueva calle paralela a la vieja muralla del norte de la ciudad, que se estaba cayendo a pedazos. A esa nueva calle la llamaron Wall Street, o calle del Muro. Ese año, los anglicanos sentaron los cimientos de una gran iglesia en la esquina de Wall Street y Broadway, a la que pusieron por nombre Trinity Church, o iglesia de la Trinidad.

Here is a community goal: to be able to identify one pattern of sin in our lives

For so long this had been my life, but it was all in the past. Now we all had to try and find the future.

Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.

But no one has ever gone from slavery to freedom with the slaveholders cheering them on, nor contributed significantly to the evolution of our species by working a forty-hour week, nor achieved any significant accomplishment by taking refuge in cynicism.

If a man didn't make mistakes he'd own the world in a month. But if he didn't profit by his mistakes he wouldn't own a blessed thing.

She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still

Life was indeed a continuous lesson in finding ways to be less troubled by certain things, so that we might make room for new concerns, which arrived with the promptness and regularity of mail coaches.

Life was indeed a continuous lesson in finding ways to be less troubled by certain things, so that we might make room for new concerns