Quotes About Progress

Learning is most likely if people get immediate, clear feedback after each try.

People think about life in terms of changes, not levels.

my boss was saying intellectual investment is like compound interest: the more you do, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc. I do not know what compound interest rate to assign, but it must be well over 6%—one extra hour per day over a lifetime will much more than double the total output. The steady application of a bit more effort has a great total accumulation.

computers are now often an essential component of a good design.

Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teacher's past.

To see the obvious it often takes an outsider, or else someone like me who is thoughtful and wonders what he is doing and why it is all necessary. Even when told, the old timers will persist in the ways they learned, probably out of pride for their past and an unwillingness to admit there are better ways than those they were using for so long.

If California ever becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the centre of its prosperity.

A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind.

Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer. HUMPHRY DAVY

Every invention, every innovation in the history of the world, has been laughed at. Columbus was renounced as a faker; Morse was called a crank; Franklin a fool; Charles Darwin ridiculed for years. It seems to be the fate of every man or woman who discovers a new fact, to be made the subject of attacks of the most violent nature, without rhyme or reason.

We need a revolution in academia, with every social science attempting to understand the causes of happiness.

Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile. Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and the potential for healing?

Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.

After death.) So few people who come across, possess awareness of any kind. All they bring along with them are worthless values. All they desire is continuation of what they had in life no matter how misguided or degraded. . . Will those people ever progress, even with our help?

Those who've marred their appearance in any way by their actions in life aren't forced to witness that marring. If they were, they'd become self-conscious and be unable to concentrate on improving themselves.

For him the word 'horror' had become obsolete.

There were still many things to learn, but not so many as before. Strangely, life was becoming almost bearable.

To look at the entire journey all at once was stupidity. You thought of it in segments; that was the only way.

Goddamn your bones, that is the first step.

There were still many things to learn, but not so many as before.

There's nothing wrong with civilization. We're just no there yet.

remember that the doubts you may feel today will be the issues you'll be confidently dissecting tomorrow.

There was a time, and we can easily see it in the five or six centuries that run roughly from the time of Socrates to the time of Epictetus, when the idea of education was very simple, and the supposed consequences of education, tremendous. With us, it is the other way around.

She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back.