Quotes About Progress

Mistakes can be fixed but if you do it more than once, it's no longer a mistake.

Every year in America we add hundreds of words to our dictionaries that describe our infatuation with pop culture and technology, but none that describe a deepening regard for the natural world.

History shows that socialism first triumphed in relatively backwards countries, not in the countries where capitalism had developed.

You can only kill disappointment with a new try.

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.

And, you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there's no way back, no way to go but onward.

History is humankind trying to get a grip.

Sometimes I think it's only post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all.

It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere. So don't blame yourself when those things happen. Don't let yesterday take up much of today.

They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

Slow is not the same as deficient. It's just slow. A glacier is slow too, but it gets there, and nothing stops it.

We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.

Possibly some of the richest two percent of the world's population have decided to give up on the pretense that "progress" or "development" or "prosperity" can be achieved for all eight billion of the world's people.

My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit.

Of course there is always resistance, always a drag on movement toward better things. The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.

history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died;

Kim Stanley Robinson

We are the primitives of an unknown civilization

History is humankind trying to get a grip. Obviously not easy. But it could go better if you would pay a little more attention to certain details, like for instance your planet.

by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it's too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won't work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn't you?

Kim Stanley Robinson