Progress Quotes

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

We should use our imagination more than our memory.

~ Shimon Peres

I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.

~ Bartolomeo Vanzetti

In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Thousands, if not millions, of people had exchanged life for the negation of life simply so that someone like me could have the pleasure of riding in a taxi. And now thousands more were throwing away their lives in order to try and eliminate global suffering, and they didn't see the senselessness of that, though it screamed out from every page of history and from every street-corner; in the scream you could hear the universal lack of order and lack of satisfaction and all the other shortcomings which were in fact the very essence of life - remove them, do away with them, and what would be left?

~ Leonid Borodin

Even so, I think historians have more to offer than perspective on our present woes. The foreign country we call the past also lets us look beyond the horizons of what is, to see what could be.

~ Rutger Bregman

Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests

~ Edward Hallett Carr

Without trust there's no cooperation. And without cooperation there's no progress. History stops.

~ Rick Yancey

When you look back at that relationship you didn't think you could live without and realize had you stayed in it, you'd be some comfortable loser, sitting on the couch with another comfortable loser, instead of being the dope motherfucker you are today.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.

~ Will And Ariel Durant

We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity—the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity—the conspiracy of the free men against the slaves!.... If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children.And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion.

~ Tadeusz Borowski

Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-- they cannot work and their civilization collapses

~ Frank Herbert

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

~ Jane Addams

This is how we progress as humans. We went from horseless carriages to self-driving, self-organizing transport in a hundred and fifty years. We went from powered flight to putting a man on the moon in sixty years. We’ve always progressed in leaps and bounds. It is our ability, no, our duty, to do what is efficient, and to do what is best, to evolve not just our vehicles and our cities and our homes, but also the social structures that hold us back

~ Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Of course, with any new technology, the question in the back of everyone's mind is 'Can I have sex with it or use it to kill people?'-Flintstones Vol. 2: Bedrock Bedlam

~ Mark Russell

Our inventions have long been ahead of us in terms of efficiency and sanity, productivity and predictability. Oh, how we’ve wished we could be manmade, too. What has been keeping us back, keeping us messy? The animal impediment, within and without. Eliminating these impediments, we will surely be catching up with our machines, resembling them more and more impeccably.

~ Amy Leach

What is natural, needs to be looked upon, scrutinized and reshaped by each generation of the world, to make it compatible with the path of progress of a civilized society.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Accepting evil is worse than committing evil.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Accepting evil is worse than committing evil. You must – I repeat – you must, as a human being, stand up on the side of humanism, against barbarian inhumanism, for it is your action, that shall determine whether your children shall live in a world of peace and harmony or a world of chaos and discriminations.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Acceptance does not mean accepting those who disregard humans on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Now is the time that we make conscientious efforts towards becoming a real wise species, free from all sorts of bigotry, mysticism and sectarianism.

~ Abhijit Naskar

As humanity progresses its technology on a global level, the observed degradation of natural processes and growth cycles are the alarm systems that nature uses to alert us that some of this progress is biologically toxic.

~ Steven Magee

During these times of stress and strain where society is flooded with negativity and loss of hope for humanity, I have a friendly reminder. I am a firm believer in the particularly special sect in society that happens to be significantly socially educated in modern generations. I want to kindly remind you of the people that grasp hope and humanity firmly in one hand and their neighbor with the other. There is a significant amount of loving and educated people that will be the reason we look back at negative events that occur today in awe. And with so much bigotry and lack of humanity today, we must remember that with no struggle there is no progress. The struggles we experience today are the motives for the progress and accomplishments of tomorrow, remember that. When you encounter social pessimism, remember to set the example for newer generations to come and leave the past to dwell where it belongs.

~ Ghaleya Aldhafiri

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

~ Alasdair Gray

So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.

~ Jack London

Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.

~ Amy Lowell

In science, work (W) is done when force (F) move a body through a distance (D). It is the same with our every day affairs. When you don't progress, no work is done irrespective of the force (power) you have

~ Israelmore Ayivor

As some people turned to religion for comfort, so, Highsmith wrote in her notebook in September 1970, she took refuge in her belief that she was making progress as a writer. But she realised that both systems of survival were, however, fundamentally illusory. She wrote, she said, quoting Oscar Wilde because, 'Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality'.

~ Andrew Wilson

Entrepreneurs don't have weekends or birthdays or holidays. Every day is my weekend, my birthday, my holiday. OR, every day is my work day. Mostly it's a choice.

~ Richie Norton

We have undoubtedly achieved Pakistan, and that too without bloody war, practically peacefully, by moral and intellectual force, and with the power of the pen, which is no less mighty than that of the sword and so our righteous cause has triumphed. Are we now going to besmear and tarnish this greatest achievement for which there is no parallel in the history of the world? Pakistan is now a fait accompli and it can never be undone, besides, it was the only just, honourable, and practical solution of the most complex constitutional problem of this great subcontinent. Let us now plan to build and reconstruct and regenerate our great nation...

~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Each day is an opportunity for you to expand your horizon, to achieve your maximum potential. You may have encountered some obstacles along the way, but don't allow those moments to hinder your progress. In life, we all faces challenges that we must overcome. The importance is to learn from those difficulties and become stronger.

~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

There is no greater peace than work and no greater happiness than progress.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

The world is no longer white, black, yellow and brown. Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.

~ Suzy Kassem

Despite progress witnessed elsewhere in the matters of heart, parents in this part of the world hadn’t quite come around to letting their adult offspring choose their lovers.

~ Pawan Mishra

Hold onto who loves and honor you.Not everyone will know how to.Some souls don't even know how to love and honor themselves, let alone you.

~ Lalah Delia

No matter where you are along life’s path, your next step is your first step.

~ Toni Sorenson

Girls you've gotta know when it's time to turn the page.

~ Tori Amos

Presuming that there is such a thing as progress when it comes to music, and that music is better now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't improve.

~ David Byrne

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

There is only one limitation that exists in our minds, which can indeed reduce the speed of our progress; that is the limitation of our understanding

~ Sunday Adelaja