Quotes About Progress

O domínio do passado não implica em uma imagem de imobilidade social. É compatível com visões cíclicas de mudança histórica, e certamente com a regressão e a catástrofe (ou seja, o fracasso em reproduzir o passado). É incompatível com a ideia de progesso contínuo.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven and who believed that nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Most often in history it was the conquerors who learned willingly from the conquered.

In times of change the learners will inherit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo.

Action is a unifier.

The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration

Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.     104

On the other hand, those who reject the present and fix their eyes and hearts on things to come have a faculty for detecting the embryo of future danger or advantage in the ripeness of their times.

It is well for those who hug the present and want to preserve it as it is not to play with mass movements. For it always fares ill with the present when a genuine mass movement is on the march.

The danger of the fanatic to the development of a movement is that he cannot settle down. Once victory has been won and the new order begins to crystallize, the fanatic becomes an element of strain and disruption.

Another English revolution by the rich occurred at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was the Industrial Revolution. The breathtaking potentialities of mechanization set the minds of manufacturers and merchants on fire. They began a revolution "as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians,"8 and in a relatively short time these respectable, Godfearing citizens changed the face of England beyond recognition. When

The discarded and rejected are often the raw material of a nation's future.

growth comes only when you consciously push yourself onto foreign and uncomfortable-feeling sections of wall.

No sabemos a dónde vamos, sino tan sólo que la historia nos ha llevado hasta este punto y -si los lectores comparten el planteamiento de este libro- por qué. Sin embargo, una cosa está clara: si la humanidad ha de tener un futuro, no será prolongando el pasado o el presente. Si intentamos construir el tercer milenio sobre estas bases, fracasaremos. Y el precio del fracaso, esto es, la alternativa a una sociedad transformada, es la oscuridad

it takes as long as three generations of hard work, three generations of sacrifice to correct the wrong!

we shed the skins of who we used to be!

Turning a cheek never helped a man advance in this world.

We were making some progress on climate-change adaptation in the late 1990s," Klaus Jacob observed. "But September 11th set us back a decade on extreme-weather hazards, because we started focusing on a completely different set of threats.

During the civil rights movement, large majorities of the public thought that Freedom Rides and lunch-counter sit-ins and marches across militarized bridges were counterproductive, and that reform was moving too quickly and disruptively. Today, all those tactics have been sanctified in national memory.

The ascending spiral, one of the central images of early American letters and employed especially by Emerson, is probably an unconscious piece of every American's personal mythology. Its shorthand name is progress.