Quotes About Progress

There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.

Before Sutter, native people had heeded the cycle of the seasons, time was infinite, and life's rhythms were unchanging. Now, for at least part of their lives, some Indians were wedded to a concept that proclaimed that time was limited and that it had economic value. The clang of Sutter's bell announced that time was money, that it marched onward, and that it waited for no man, including Indians in the 1840s.

It is in our best interest to. . . embark on a revolutionary change that will lead us away from oil dependency rather than drag our feet and suffer the costs of becoming growingly dependent on a diminishing resource.' Truer words were never written.

cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than to extend slave territory.

The ' colonized do not know how to breath', the 'people here do not know how walk; they make little steps which do not get them ahead.

Philosophy is a kind of journey, ever learning yet never arriving at the ideal perfection of truth.

The African is my brother-but he is my younger brother by several centuries.

No ray of sunshine is ever lost but the green that it awakens takes time to sprout, and it is not always given the sower to see the harvest.

By itself the affirmation of life can only produce a partial and imperfect civilization. Only if it turns inward and becomes ethical can the will to progress attain the ability to distinguish the valuable from the worthless. We must therefore strive for a civilization that is not based on the accretion of science and power alone, but which cares most of all for the spiritual and ethical development of the individual and of humankind. How

Therefore, the more technological the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology…. Consequently this trial must contribute to laying down the ground rules for life in human society. What does my own fate signify, after all that has happened and in comparison with so important a goal?

I was encouraged to hear that GM has made great progress on the hydrogen car.

Look back only for as long as you must, Then go forward into the history you will make. Be good, then better.

I don't always feel what I know I should feel. My thought crosses the river I swim very slowly Because the suit men made it wear weighs it down.

Ni la perfección ni la madurez están entre mis metas.

I don't want to be a prisoner of comfort.

graba nu scurteaz? drumul, ci îl face doar mai obositor.

Not houses finely roofed or the stones of walls well builded, nay nor canals and dockyards make the city, but men able to use their opportunity.

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important that television.

We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its costs in things natural, wild, and free.

This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations

Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?

These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live. The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization

Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.