Quotes About Progress

There's a Chinese saying. 'When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.' " The Chinese engineer smiles. "Good one." " 'When is the next best time? Now.' " "Ah! Okay!" The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

I see people as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn't come to be yet.

The time is well past for the church, particularly the Western church, to rethink and reimagine what it means to be the church in the twenty-first century.

Richard Reeves

The price to sequence a base [of the human genome] has fallen 100 million times. That's the equivalent of you filling up your car with gas in 1998, waiting until 2011, and now you can drive to Jupiter and back twice.

The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day. [Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.]

Happiness is not yesterday; it's from now on.

Architecture is a slow business, and city planning even slower.

Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

And S. Gregory says:—"Our life is like a man in a ship; sit he, stand he, sleep he, wake he, ever he gets thitherward where the ship is driving with the force of the weather. So we, in this short time, whatsoever we do, we drive ever to our end." And our enemy

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.

it is through sentiment and sympathy, not through rationality and universalistic moral discourse, that democratic advances take place. This is why he considers books like Uncle Tom's Cabin to have played a more important role than philosophical treatises in securing moral progress."12

If you try to force the mingling of people who are not yet ready to mingle, and don't want to mingle, development cannot succeed economically.

If young people are not taught an accurate account of how we came to be segregated, their generation will have little chance of doing a better job of desegregating than the previous ones.

You've been going round and round—haven't you? Round and round! You didn't know you were going somewhere, but you were! Like a paper boat in a whirlpool—round and round! And now you've arrived at the center!

The rise of the bourgeoisie" is a hackneyed phrase, so much so that one historian has been moved to comment that the only historical constant is that the middle classes are always everywhere rising.

The world champion rider in any event was at one time a beginner

Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here's the desire to put it inside us, and then the question behind every question: What happens next?

Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other.

I try, I do. I try and try. A happy ending?

It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green.

It isn't over yet, it's just begun.

We are all going forward. None of us are going back.