Quotes About Progress

We toil after goals, most of them—indeed every single one of them—of transitory significance and, having gained one of them, we immediately set forth for the next, as if that one had never been, with this next one being essentially more of the same. Look at a busy street any day, and observe the throng going hither and thither. To what? Some office or shop, where the same things will be done today as were done yesterday, and are done now so they may be repeated tomorrow…

Try to see the past as a room separate from the one you live in now. You can go in there, but you don't live there anymore.

We do learn from experience and may not make the same mistakes again, but there is a whole new pickle jar of fresh ones just lying in wait for us to trip up and fall into. The secret is to accept this and not to beat yourself up when you do make new ones.

We trigger each other, it seems, some dysfunctional Rube Goldberg mousetrap, a laugh, then a slap, a razor gliding over a mirror, a glass filled, a glass emptied, a ball rolling down a length of pipe, a pipe filling up and overflowing with smoke. On our best days, we see each other for all that we are, and we find a way to make each other better.

Richard Turner

Brillat-Savarin and Symons were right to say that we have tamed nature with fire. We should indeed pin our humanity on cooks.

Without the learned skills passed down to us by previous generations, we are in trouble. With them, we dominate the planet.

The moral sense was once explained purely by religion. Now an evolutionary account is needed.

We know that over time society sometimes improves in quality, and sometimes decays. What we cannot know is which direction our descendants will take.

The control of fire and the practice of cooking are human universals.

I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts - the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.

Parsifal is on his way to the temple of the Grail Knights and says: "I hardly move, yet far I seem to have come", and the all-knowing Gurnemanz replies: "You see, my son, time turns here into space

As the mayor of Chicago told a labor rally on May Day in 1867, eight hours of work had become more exhausting than ten or twelve hours had been earlier.

In 1870 in response to the Fifteenth Amendment, the citizens of Michigan made a simple but far-reaching alteration to their 1850 constitution. They struck out the word "white.

The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. … But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much.

In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment.

If we had been allowed to participate in the vital processes of America's national growth, what would have been the textures of our lives, the pattern of our traditions, the routine of our customs, the state of our arts, the code of our laws, the function of our government!… We black folk say that America would have been stronger and greater.

Luther said that every Christian is "simul justus et peccator, comprehensor et viator"—"simultaneously righteous and sinful, a man who has reached the goal and one who reaches out toward it.

reminded him of the great scientists who have been Christians—from Newton and Kepler to Pavlov and the discoverer of anaesthetics, Sir James Simpson. Luca said, "They conformed to the conventions of the time." I said, "Do you know the declaration of Louis Pasteur, who discovered microbes and vaccination? 'Je crois comme une charbonnière le plus que je progresse en science.

They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing.

They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing.

And maybe things like this really did get better of their own accord, if you gave them time; maybe all you could ever do, beyond suffering, was wait and see what might be going to happen next.

It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress, and it looked as if it would take all summer.

People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering...