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  ...and representatives must plainly be found among the men and women of the community, and cannot possibly be found anywhere else. Progress is not automatic, in the sense that if we were all to be cast into a deep slumber for the space of a generation, we should awake to find ourselves in a greatly improved social state. The world only grows better, even in the moderate degree in which it does grow better, because people wish that it should, and take the right steps to make it better. Evolution is not a force but a process. Not a cause but a law.   It explains the source, and marks the immovable limitations, of social energy. But social energy itself can never be superseded either by evolution or by anything else.
The reproach of being impracticable and artificial attaches by rights not to those who insist on resolute, persistent, and uncompromising efforts to remove abuses, but to a very different class--to those, namely, who are credulous enough to suppose that abuses and bad customs and wasteful ways of doing things will...
 
Morley, John

Excerpt from On Compromise · This quote is about evolution · Search on Google Books to find all references and sources for this quotation.


A bit about Morley, John ...

The Right Honourable John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, OM, PC (1838 - 1923) was a British Liberal statesman and writer.

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