Progress quotes
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"It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm."
"Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation."
"People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?"
"Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men."
"Social progress takes effect through the replacement of all institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step."
"The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future."
"In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens, a substantial part of its whole population, who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. 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."
"The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations."
"There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress I the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires."
"What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?"
"For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old."
"The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression."
"I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction."
"We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !"
"Activity does not necessarily equal progress."
"Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance."
"Progress is a comfortable disease."
"Unlike physical progress, which is subject to natural restrictions, the qualities of the mind can be developed limitlessly."
"Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species."
"The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?"
