Quotes about progress

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

— Jane Addams

If the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet.

— Charles M. Allen

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

— Gaston Bachelard

Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.

— Walter Bagehot

It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.

— Tony Benn

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

— Christian Nevell Bovee

All progress is experimental.

— John Jay Chapman

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart.

— John Jay Chapman

New roads; new ruts.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

— Shirley Anita Chisholm

We are either progressing or retrograding all the while. There is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life.

— James Freeman Clarke

He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.

— Calvin Coolidge

Nothing recedes like progress.

— E.E. (Edward. E.) Cummings

I was taught that the way of progress I neither swift nor easy.

— Madame Marie Curie

The pace of progress will accelerate so that even engineers and technical managers will find it necessary to recycle back through school after no more than ten years. In particular fast-moving technologies skills will become obsolete every five years or so.

— Owen Davies

Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

— Thomas A. Edison

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

— George Eliot

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another.

— Havelock Ellis

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

With every passing hour, our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.

— Ransom K. Ferm

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

— Nadine Gordimer

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

— Joyce Grenfell

A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.

— Bill Grey

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.

— Sidney J. Harris

This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.

— Alexander Herzen

The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage.

— Herbert Clark Hoover

The world is moving so fast now-a-days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

— Elbert Hubbard

Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress.

— Victor Hugo

Progress is the stride of God.

— Victor Hugo

I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.

— Henry J. Kaiser

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

— John F. Kennedy

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

— Karl Kraus

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

— Karl Kraus

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?

— Stanislaw J. Lec

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

— Claude Levi-Strauss

I walk slowly, but I never walk backward.

— Abraham Lincoln

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back.

— Abraham Lincoln

We have not wings we cannot soar; but, we have feet to scale and climb, by slow degrees, by more and more, the cloudy summits of our time.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Time advances: facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain, and penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!

— Og Mandino

Progress is a tide. If we stand still we will surely be drowned. To stay on the crest, we have to keep moving.

— Harold Mayfield

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.

— Henry Miller

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

— Lewis Mumford

Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.

— Ogden Nash

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

— George Orwell

Progress is mediation comes swiftly for those who try their hardest.

— Pantanjali

It takes five years to design a new car in this country. Heck, we won World War II in four years.

— H. Ross Perot

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

— Pablo Picasso

Not to go back is somewhat to advance, and men must walk, at least, before they dance.

— Alexander Pope

Every convenience brings its own inconveniences along with it.

— Proverb

Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.

— Chinese Proverb

When a blind man carries a lame man both go forward.

— Swedish Proverb

The simplest school boy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

— Ernest Renan

You can't say that civilization don't advance... for in every war they kill you a new way.

— Will Rogers

A process which led from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress -- though whether the amoebae would agree with this opinion is not known.

— Bertrand Russell

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

— George Santayana

All progress means war with society.

— George Bernard Shaw

All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.

— George Bernard Shaw

The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.

— William Gilmore Simms

The progress of the world is the history of men who would not permit defeat to speak the final word.

— Joseph R. Sizoo

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

— Henry David Thoreau

Why aren't we making any progress towards a crime-free society? We're not making progress because we are too damn busy making excuses.

— Source Unknown

Most people are in favor of progress, it's the changes they don't like.

— Source Unknown

Today's progress was yesterday's plan.

— Source Unknown

Once an organization loses its spirit of pioneering and rests on its early work, its progress stops.

— Thomas J. Watson

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

— Oscar Wilde

A radical is one of whom people say He goes too far. A conservative, on the other hand, is one who doesn't go far enough. Then there is the reactionary, one who doesn't go at all. All these terms are more or less objectionable, wherefore we have

— Woodrow T. Wilson

Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

— Robert Heinlein

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

— Russell (Wayne) Baker

We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

— Dejan Stojanovic

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

— Frederick Douglass

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

— Philip Roth

Success is not a journey, it's a destination called satisfaction.

— Anuj Somany