Quotes About Progress

Surveying the travails of the thirtieth president, some writers have suggested that those personal defeats are the essence of the Coolidge story. They err. Coolidge's is not a story of "Yes, but." It is a story of "But yes." For at every stage, Coolidge did push forward, and so triumph.

Black illiteracy decreased to 16.4 percent in 1930, from 45 percent in 1900. Fewer black babies died at birth—by half. Black life expectancy was rising. Most important, blacks were able to find work at about the same rates whites did. Data from the 1930 census would show black unemployment nationally standing slightly below white unemployment.

Telephone books are, like dictionaries, already out of date the moment they are printed....

Every mistake is a lesson

What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing?

Cities with all their advantages have something hostile to liberal learning, the seductions are so subtle and accost the senses so openly on all sides.

A birthday is a good time to begin anew; throwing away the old habits, as you would old clothes, and never putting them on again.

When a man's own culture falls behind that of his time, he is conservative. When it outstrips and enables him to over-see his time, he is a reformer.

This has the whiff of August 1945," said former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden, referring to the emergence of the atomic bomb. "That's a big deal."105

It's difficult for analysts to get better at predicting when they don't know if their past predictions were ever any good.30

In 2000, approximately 15 percent of the world's population was connected to the Internet.51 Today, more than half the world is online, and more people are estimated to have mobile phones than access to running water.

moving forward only because backward wasn't possible.

You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered.

Finding out that you are wrong is even more valuable than being right, because you are learning.

Creating psychological safety is a constant process of smaller and larger corrections that add up to forward progress. Like tacking upwind, you must zig right and then zag left and then right again, never able to head exactly where you want to go and never quite knowing when the wind will change.

There is no such thing as a straight line, the sun does not go down, and it is time we updated our language. A more mesmerizing discourse I have never heard.

OpenTable CEO Christa Quarles tells employees, "early, often, ugly. It's O.K. It doesn't have to be perfect because then I can course-correct much, much faster.

For over a century, we've focused too much on relentless execution and depended too much on fear to get things done. That era is over.

But in recent years, whether because of growing strength or growing frustration with the lack of progress, the Left has upped the ante. A shift in tone, rhetoric, and logic has moved identity politics away from inclusion—which had always been the Left's watchword—toward exclusion and division.

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.

I could see the genius in allowing future to evolve. You could create momentum. You could launch something and see where it goes. You couldn't line everything up, like so many dominoes, and make everything fall into place.

Standing firm is great, kiddo, but so is admitting you made a mistake and fixing it.

Who would know but ten years ago that kids would be texting each other all the time, that that would be one of their main forms of communication.

Maybe someday, it won't have to be a tragedy to be gay, you