Quotes About Progress

Setting omnibuses on rails increased the number of passengers that horses could haul and improved the ride. In 1856, when New York City's Common Council judged street-level steam locomotives to be dangerous and barred them below Forty-Second Street, horse-drawn street railways replaced them.

Horses increased in number after the commercialization of the steam engine because horsepower filled the niche below steam power. A horse stood ready to pull a cart or plow a field on command, without the delay of building up a head of steam. Energy transitions are seldom so complete that they drive out every competitor. Much of the world still relies on animals for farm work and transportation: horses, oxen, camels, llamas, water buffalo, elephants, even fellow humans.

few of the fathers of physicists were businessmen.

The real change away from horse-drawn transportation came with the advent in the late 1880s of the electric streetcar. Frank Julian Sprague, a West Point–trained electrical engineer, installed the first commercial electric streetcar system in Richmond, Virginia, in 1887.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer

By the turn of the century, the electric streetcar had largely replaced the use of horses in public transportation. The animals continued to serve for general hauling, merchandise delivery, and small-scale energy generation. In fact, their urban numbers actually increased.32 Only the development of the internal combustion engine and its application to power the truck and the automobile across the years 1900 to 1915 replaced the city horse with mechanical transportation.

Unlike the Stockton & Darlington, which had won through the parliamentary authorization process with little difficulty, the Liverpool & Manchester encountered fierce resistance from canal owners, stagecoach operators, turnpike trusts, and innkeepers who had come to understand that railway competition was likely to be fatal to their businesses and investments. Nor did the landed gentry whose wayleave the new railway needed to acquire want any part of so noisy and smoky a fire hazard.

The boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum. Thus with one sentence I can summarize my academic career. It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects the boy to the man.

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good.

In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward and onward--and by ourselves. It works for so few, and it cannot serve us well in the long run--because it is not true. It is an inherently win-lose game, and more and more people find themselves on the losing side.

God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience.

We moved from wondering to answering, which has not served us well at all.

One has to wonder, do we really want people to grow, or do we just want to be in control of the moment?

Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.

You do not think yourself into a new way of living as much as you live your way into a new way of thinking.

You normally have to let go of the old and go through a stage of unknowing or confusion, before you can move to another level of awareness or new capacity.

Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.

New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

The British-American author D.H. Lawrence said that "the world fears a new experience more than anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE As

there is an early stage "holiness" that looks like the real thing, but it isn't.