quotations about progress
Progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
ROBERT BROWNING
"De Gustibus"
The ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil--possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.
POPE BENEDICT XVI
Encyclical Letter, Spe Salvi, November 30, 2007
Fix your eyes, indeed, upon one race, or one age, and you may have to admit that there have been long periods during which there has been no movement, or a movement only of retrogression. But the torpor that has paralyzed one branch of the human family has been balanced by the youthful vigor of another; now one nation, and now another, may have led the van, but the van itself has been ever pressing forward; and though there have been periods in the world's history when it may well have seemed to the most sanguine observers that the powers that make for progress were exhausted, that culture was giving place to barbarism, and civil order to unlettered anarchy, time and the event have shown that such prophets were wrong, and out of the wreck of the old order a new order has always arisen more perfect and more full of promise than that which it replaced.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune
Society moves slowly toward civilization, but when we compare epochs half a century apart, we perceive many signs that progress is made.
MRS. L. M. CHILD
attributed, Day's Collacon
It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.
JANE ADDAMS
Twenty Years at Hull House
Our habitual instructors, our ordinary conversation, our inevitable and ineradicable prejudices tend to make us think that "Progress" is the normal fact in human society, the fact which we should expect to see, the fact which we should be surprised if we did not see. But history refutes this. The ancients had no conception of progress; they did not so much as reject the idea; they did not even entertain the idea.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
The key to any progress is to ask the question why? All the time. Why is that child poor? Why was there a war? Why was he killed? Why is he in power? And of course questions can get you into a lot of trouble, because society is trained by those who run it, to accept what goes on. Without questions we won't make any progress at all.
TONY BENN
interview, Creating Freedom
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
The Life of Reason
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
HENRY GEORGE
Progress and Poverty
The law of man's bodily progress is also the law of his mental progress; both must be gradual. No grand idea can be realized except by successive steps and stages, which the mind must use as landing places in its ascent.
EDWARD MEYRICK GOULBURN
Thoughts on Personal Religion
The more thou dost advance, the more thy feet pitfalls will meet.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
The Theosophist
Progress is a set of assumptions.
EDWARD ALBEE
Seascape
Let us labor for that larger and larger comprehension of truth, that more and more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Unless we progress, we regress.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
State of the Union Address, January 9, 1959
Remember that progress is not linear either. Sometimes you make great progress for a while and then you slide back a little. That's OK. Don't give up.
LEE LABRADA
FaceBook post, September 30, 2014
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Character of Physical Law
It often happens that the great and heroic mind, buried in the profoundest obscurity, works out the grandest problems of human progress.
J. H. HAMMOND
attributed, Day's Collacon
There are three great elements of progress, the steam-engine, the printing-press, and the ballot-box.
EDWARD CHRISTIAN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Let us, then, never look back, let us look ever forward; for forward is our sunlight, forward our salvation.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State