Progress Quotes

I suppose none of what I'm saying matters. In a few years a search like this won't even be necessary. We have instruments now that can be mounted on the underside of an airplane. To find a man all you have to do is fly over the spot where you think he is, and the machine will register his body heat. Right now there aren't enough of those machines to go around. Most of them are in the war. But when we come home from there, well, a man on the run won't have hope. And a man like me, he won't be needed. This is the last of something. It's too bad. As much as I hate war, I fear the day when machines take the place of men. At least now a man can still get along on his talents.

~ David Morrell

In the 1940s dams were synonymous with progress, and the rivers were to be conquered with the fervour of a pioneer wielding an axe.

~ Tim Palmer

We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.

~ Sigmund Freud

Life is all about progress and movements, keep it moving.

~ Hopal Green

Some problems were generational, you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types.

~ Iain M. Banks

Prejudices, mysticism, bigotry these things only distort religion, like they have actually done to the most religions of the world.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Bring all your power out my friend, and throw away such Gods, such doctrines, such institutions, that impede in the path of human progress.

~ Abhijit Naskar

A religion that demands absolutely irrefutable obedience, is anything but religion.

~ Abhijit Naskar

It's not like the Middle Ages, when you had the Church and the aristocracy keeping everything nice and stagnant.

~ Kevin Hearne

During several centuries Clochemerle, far from the cities and trade routes, had lived in stillness and isolation. But now, at last, the clamour of the great world was crossing the invisible barrier, bringing doubts, temptations, and discontents.

~ Gabriel Chevallier

Patriotism is about a desire for progress, not a yearning for repetition.

~ Gina Barreca

Progress is in simplification, which often follows complexity.

~ Pearl Zhu

Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or more were effaced, and there he was, the alert and predatory sub-human, further from what she believed man should be like than the naked savage, because the savage was tractable, while this creature, wearing the armor of his own rigid barbaric culture, consciously defied progress. And that was what Stenham saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness, and excited his praise precisely because he was “pure”: there was no room in his personality for anything that mankind had not already fully developed long ago. To him he was a consolation, a living proof that today’s triumph was not yet total; he personified Stenham’s infantile hope that time might still be halted and man sent back to his origins.

~ Paul Bowles

Progress is a collection of expectations set and met.

~ Ashlecka Aumrivani

When you keep seeking to improve, you will never get bored with your craft.

~ Dr. Jacinta Mpalyenkana

a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress ... until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known

~ Carl Lotus Becker

The human race is a letdown, Ernest — a bad, bad letdown. And I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed, but it hasn’t. It thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime, but it hasn’t. It’s wallowing in it. It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and to our eyes and to our souls. We’ve invented a few things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet. Endless, peaceful quiet. Something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions.

~ Noël Coward

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Progress was never meant to be stinted, and even failures weren’t to be destroyed.

~ Elise Kova

Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like forward and farther are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it. (If fascination with the word forward has become universal, isn't it mainly because death is already speaking to us from nearby?)

~ Milan Kundera

It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.

~ Victor Hugo

It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awake that slumbering Progress.

~ Victor Hugo

The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming; a long outwaiting.

~ N. Scott Momaday

The only way you’re going to be defeated is if you allow your brain to shut down your body. If you stop making progress, you’re damned.

~ Toni Sorenson

It is not where one is, but in what direction he is going.

~ George Macdonald

The mind is an innovation engine of any human progress, but also the root cause of almost all human problems.

~ Pearl Zhu

Our scars are like the rings in a tree trunk, showing its progress through life. How we heal and move forward through adversity . . . that is what makes the difference.

~ Morgan Rhodes

Consistently failing is nothing more than an indication that you are progressing. The more we fail the farther we will see. Failure is not an option, it is the only option. A master is a master because he has had the courage to fail and the wisdom to learn from it.

~ Chris Matakas

Measuring progress is often like watching grass grow. While it’s difficult to detect movement on a daily basis, it’s simple to see growth over time.

~ Frank Sonnenberg

There is no need for me to worry, I've already been here somany times and each time I have made it throughalive

~ Michael Dodson Jr.

Innovation is a progress, and progress in simplicity.

~ Pearl Zhu

Strategy is for making progress and progress is in simplicity.

~ Pearl Zhu

It seems strange to me that mechanical progress always seems to leave the slower demands of elegance far behind.

~ William Pène Du Bois

O what we ben! And what we come to!

~ Russell Hoban

There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man’s mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City.

~ Isaac Asimov

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life.

~ Barry Schwartz

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous 'onward and upward' slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.

~ Milan Kundera

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

~ Jeanette Winterson

Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can do so only because they ignore history . Pogroms are as old as Christendom , but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. (..) Scientific fundamentalism claim that science is the disinterested pursuit of the truth. But to represent science in this way is to disregard the human needs science serves. Among us science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up.

~ John Gray

Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.

~ Eugene V. Debs