Quotes About Progress

De hellingen van de berg dragen het leven, niet de top.

I add, almost to myself, "You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future.

Perhaps the best single thing to learn is to recognize a value trap when you're in it and work on that before you continue on the machine.

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.

Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble is that the expansion has to be made at the roots, not at the branches, and that's what makes it hard to see.

This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind

Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren't necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.

In the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn't used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit moral intuition, a gut instinct concerning moral truth, only because of the fierce moral reasoning (and activism) of those who came before us, when the average person's moral intuitions were unrecognizably different. Our guts learn their intuitions.

All of us fail, but this doesn't mean we are failures.

And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity.

All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains.

In der Wissenschaft kommt es alle paar Jahre vor, daß etwas, das bis dahin als Fehler galt, plötzlich alle Anschauungen umkehrt oder daß ein unscheinbarer und verachteter Gedanke zum Herrscher über ein neues Gedankenreich wird.

Het valt niet te ontkennen dat wij in elke afzonderlijke tak van het menselijk kunnen zo veel vooruitgang boeken dat wij terecht het gevoel hebben het niet bij te kunnen houden; zou het niet mogelijk zijn dat daaruit ook het gevoel ontstaat dat wij geen vooruitgang beleven? Uiteindelijk is vooruitgang niets anders dan het resultaat van alle gezamenlijke inspanningen, en eigenlijk kun je dus al van tevoren zeggend at de werkelijke vooruitgang altijd juist dat zal zijn wat niemand wilde.

One can talk about cars and X rays, of course, with a certain amount of feeling, but what else can one do about the countless other inventions and discoveries that nowadays every single day brings forth, other than to marvel at human inventiveness in general, which in the long run gets to be too tiresome!

e presto o tardi sorger un'epoca di ovvio cameratismo sessuale, in cui ragazzi e ragazze in concordia discorde staranno davanti a un cumulo di vecchie molle spezzate che prima costituivano l'uomo e la donna!

There's no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general cultural-medium.

Der Zug der Zeit ist ein Zug, der seine Schienen vor sich her rollt. Der Fluß der Zeit ist ein Fluß, der seine Ufer mitführt.

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different. Do

Only I thought that the Rip Van Winkle story was all wrong. You went to sleep for a long time, and when you woke up nothing whatsoever had changed. No matter how long you slept, it was the same.

I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.