Quotes About Advancement

Look at what Silicon Valley has done - the advance of computers.

Car technology needs to advance, and the best place for that to happen in is Silicon Valley.

Every game you play, you gain. There's always valuable lessons.

Our dominant values that emphasize competition and scarcity limit continued progress.

Why did civilization make things seem so much more difficult?

The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes.

why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history's broadest pattern and my book's subject. While this book is thus ultimately

That is, the adoption of food production exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process—one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has started.

example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span

BECAUSE TECHNOLOGY BEGETS more technology, the importance of an invention's diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention.

Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequalities of A.D. 1500.

Hence the greatly increased life expectancy brought by modern medicine may have contributed to the recently accelerating pace of invention.

Until around A.D. 1450, China was technologically much more innovative and advanced than Europe, even more so than medieval Islam. The long list of Chinese inventions includes canal lock gates, cast iron, deep drilling, efficient animal harnesses, gunpowder, kites, magnetic compasses, movable type, paper, porcelain, printing (except for the Phaistos disk), sternpost rudders, and wheelbarrows. China then ceased to be innovative for reasons about which we shall speculate in the Epilogue.

One reason why technology tends to catalyze itself is that advances depend upon previous mastery of simpler problems.

Larger populations mean more inventors and more competing societies.

technology was less advanced in western Europe than in any other "civilized" area of the Old World until the late Middle Ages.

For instance, the mass production of bronze tools, which was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before A.D. 1500, was already established in parts of Eurasia over 4,000 years earlier.

food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel.

If non-white groups continue to advance race-based interests, is it wise for whites to continue to act as if they have none?

Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions.

From the time we began to build houses and cities, since we invented the wheel, we have not advanced one step toward happiness. We have always been in halves. As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.

Even our best endeavors turn against us. A loom that can do the work of eight men should free eight men from servitude. Instead, seven skilled men are put out of work to starve with their families, and one skilled man because the unskilled minder of the mechanical loom. What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?

One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn't happen to everyone.

Doing work points the way to new and better work to be done.