Progress Quotes

A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.

~ P.m.s. Blackett

This is what progress does, you know. Each step into the future makes us ever so much grander and more demanding and thus ever so slightly less human.

~ Kim Wright

My life has a mysterious purpose that I don't understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.

~ Dean Koontz

Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.

~ Robert Graves

The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.

~ Richard Feynman

If everybody followed the rules, nothing would ever change. Without change there would be no progress

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

I stand beside Tom's barn and ponder the benign heedlessness of the people in the speeding cars, and here I am in the speeding car. In my heart I wish the bypass had never been built; in my car I never take the old way.

~ Michael Perry

You have something important to add, so you interrupt an exciting conversation already in progress just to let us know you have nothing to contribute to the discussion. Umm....”— Troy Ragland

~ Troy Ragland

In all, Nigeria belongs to us all and we have a personal responsibility to see that it succeeds

~ Fela Durotoye

Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that unity is plural and at minimum two - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Change often brings unimagined opportunity...If there is no struggle, there is no progress. To live in a safe cocoon- I believe that is not truly living. It is stagnation.

~ Syrie James

In all things it is better to hope than to despair.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Never restart a journey and use the same road that failed you before.

~ Dennis E. Adonis

Rights are not easy to obtain, and once we understand this, we must work attentively and persistently - and never become careless or lazy.

~ Malalai Joya

When used as a tool, fear will enhance your preparedness; when used as a guide, it will stop your progress.

~ Steve Maraboli

Progress is not about hating or destroying America, it is about loving and building the world, which can only come from healing our national dementia.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Hey, you know I might not be perfect! But I'm a wonderful work in progress!

~ D.c. Akers

We're better off. But I don't know if the world's better off. I don't know if the two are the same thing.

~ Rachel Cohn

...there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigor of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.

~ Bill Bryson

I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Progress is hard on history.

~ Justina Chen

And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf balls.

~ T.s. Eliot

So we are steaming along without any landmark, we can't gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It's not navigation but dreaming.

~ Albert Camus

I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.

~ Alasdair Gray

Where there is will there is a way Where there is a way there is progress And where there is progress there is change.

~ Amit Abraham

We're Human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill, today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill, today.

~ Robert Hamner

He looked at her defiantly, and she thought: and so one at a time we all become human—human werewolves, human dwarfs, human trolls …the melting pot melts in one direction only, and so we make progress.

~ Terry Pratchett

Change is inevitable, progress is not.

~ Max Mckeown

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! (Jane Brown's Body)

~ Cornell Woolrich

Today...major actors and actresses develop their own projects or, at the very least, cherry-pick their roles carefully to suit not only their tastes but also whatever image they have cultivated to present to their public. Most major stars have their own production companies through which such projects are developed and even financed. While the biggest male stars of that time did in fact have their own production companies--Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster, to name a few--and thus exerted creative and financial control over their careers, that was not the case with female stars. But Marilyn Monroe was about to change that.

~ J. Randy Taraborrelli

Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.

~ Richard John Neuhaus

Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind.

~ Paul Kriwaczek

Do you want to make progress? If so, then take each problem not as a challenging rival, but as an encouraging friend of yours, who is helping you to arrive at your ultimate destination.

~ Sri Chinmoy

A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it's going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that's available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.

~ Miles Davis

The word impossible is only in the mindAnd not in the heart.If we can remain in the heart,There will be no end to our progress.

~ Sri Chinmoy

We must begin where we are and move forward immediately by starting small and capitalizing on what's at hand.

~ Mike Schmoker

Look forward to failure. Fail quickly. If it does not start with Failure it is probably not meant to be

~ David Sikhosana

You need to be able to think Independently.

~ David Sikhosana

Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.

~ Gary Vaynerchuk