quotations about progress
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
Progress is a set of assumptions.
EDWARD ALBEE
Seascape
In whatever state of knowledge we may conceive man to be placed, his progress towards a yet higher state need never fear a check, but must continue till the last existence of society.
JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural History
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"
Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail", 1963
Not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may make advances in morality, but all mankind together are making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older; so that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man, who never ceases to live and learn.
BLAISE PASCAL
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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
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
The more thou dost advance, the more thy feet pitfalls will meet.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
The Theosophist
Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
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
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
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
Each man must learn his own ideal and try to accomplish it: that is a surer way of progress than to take the ideas of another.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
The Life of Vivekananda
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
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
Unless we progress, we regress.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
State of the Union Address, January 9, 1959
There are three great elements of progress, the steam-engine, the printing-press, and the ballot-box.
EDWARD CHRISTIAN
attributed, Day's Collacon