Quotes About Progress

As a child, I lived through and survived the segregated South. I sat at the back of the bus at a time when America wasn't yet as great as it could be. As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future.

If you don't have a real stake in the new, then just surviving on the old - even if it is about efficiency - I don't think is a long-term game.

Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea.

I'm sure it really is hard to be an oncologist, and actually, more and more people are surviving cancer.

In a competitive industry, only paranoid incumbents - those constantly striving for betterment - have any hope of surviving.

I survived in high school by working at Kentucky Fried Chicken and made my way up to assistant manager. I was surviving high school and college with that job.

I grew up in a household with my mother, who was a Holocaust survivor. I very much understand the mentality that you cannot live in the past. You can't spend your entire life, or even portions of it, looking back and dwelling on things that have already happened. You have to move forward.

Through persistent dedication, Susan B. Anthony, and other remarkable leaders, women were finally granted the right to vote in 1920.

Republicans were historically the party ever-expanding freedom to disenfranchised minorities, from newly liberated slaves to giving women the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony was a Republican.

I've always worked with my partner, my husband, Cameron, since 'Raw Like Sushi,' and in a way, I feel very free with what I do, but he also has an amazing insight in having intuitions that tend to be right a lot of the time, about where we should go next.

I think eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help.

I do think... gene technology has got real benefits to offer, which will have maybe an occasional downside, but I suspect not very many.

I suspect that writers and other creators are never really finished with any work.

I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.

I would suspect strongly that over a period of time, if we put our mind to going to Mars, it will be a consortium of several countries.

My experience in science has always been that the future always exceeds what we believe is possible. I suspect that we will explore the universe.

I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it.

As a young African, the sense of opportunity that fills my head on a daily basis is, I suspect, reminiscent of how young Africans felt at the cusp of independence.

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.

My sole aim is to leave everything in suspension, in flux, in order to avoid our community solidifying into a conventional academy. Our initial resources may be few, but our spirits are high, receptive, and excited, and that seems to me to be the most important thing right now.

The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion.