Progress Quotes - Page 38

• Our way lies not in human ingenuity, but in a return to God.

  Billy Graham

  Lying, Way, Return

  Billy Graham (1966). “The Quotable Billy Graham”

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• The obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty and the spirit. For it represents resistance -- that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Lying, Opportunity, Night

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• Men have always looked before and after, and rebelled against the existing order. But for their divine discontent, men would not have been men, and there would have been no progress in human affairs.

  Kabir

  Men, Order, Before And After

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• The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.

  Anton Chekhov

  Lying, Sleep, Sea

  "The Lady with the Dog". Short story by Anton Chekhov, 1899.

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• All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Thinking, Discovery, Use

  J. Robert Oppenheimer (2013). “Uncommon Sense”, p.80, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Every country should realize that its turn at world domination, domination because its rights coincided more or less with the character or progress of the epoch, must terminate with the change brought about by this progress.

  Juan Ramon Jimenez

  Country, Character, Rights

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• In the very progress of society, the prison has in the very nature of things undergone some improvement, but there are vast stretches yet to be covered before the prison becomes, if it ever does, an institution for the reclamation and rehabilitation of erring and unfortunate men and women.

  Eugene V. Debs

  Men, Progress Of Society, Doe

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• It is possible to believe in progress as a fact without believing in progress as an ethical principle; but in the catechism of many Americans, the one goes with the other.

  Norbert Wiener

  Believe, Ethical Principles, Facts

  Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.42, Da Capo Press

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• What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you're alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you just to live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm telling you to live in it. Try and get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.

  Joan Didion

  Life, Moving, Believe

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• If you improve or tinker with something long enough, eventually it will break or malfunction.

  Arthur Bloch

  Long, Enough, Break

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• The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has established a small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe.

  Stephen Hawking

  Race, Order, Understanding

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• Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.

  Hannah Arendt

  Meaningful, Work, Decision

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• Men love newfangleness.

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Men

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• I'm a work in progress.

  Barbra Streisand

  Work In Progress

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• History shows that wars are divided into two kinds-just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust.

  Mao Zedong

  War, Two, Unjust

  Zedong Mao, Mao Tse-Tung (1965). “Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung”, Pergamon

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• Few men can be said to have inimitable excellencies: let us watch them in their progress from infancy to manhood, and we shall soon be convinced that what they attained was the necessary consequence of the line they pursued, and the means they used.

  Adam Clarke

  Mean, Men, Infancy Is

  Adam Clarke, Mrs. Richard Smith (1833). “An Account of the Infancy, Religious, and Literary Life of Adam Clarke ...: Written by One who was Intimately Acquainted with Him from His Boyhood to the Sixtieth Year of His Age”, p.18

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• Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks and heretics the world would not progress.

  Gelett Burgess

  World, Sanity, Crank

  Gelett Burgess (1916). “The Romance of the Commonplace”

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• The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships "getting things done" but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.

  Octavio Paz

  Giants, Done, Worship

  Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.121, Arcade Publishing

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• Obviously, computers have made differences. They have fostered the development of spaceships- as well as a great increase in junk mail.

  Tracy Kidder

  Differences, Junk, Development

  Tracy Kidder (1982). “The soul of a new machine”, Avon Books

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• Change is inevitable; but progress depends on what we do with that change.

  Charles Wheelan

  Inevitable Change, Change Is Inevitable, Depends

  Charles Wheelan (2012). “10 1⁄2 Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said”, p.112, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The legislator is an indispensable guardian of our freedom. It is true that great executives have played a powerful role in the development of civilization, but such leaders appear sporadically, by chance. They do not always appear when they are most needed. The great executives have given inspiration and push to the advancement of human society, but it is the legislator who has given stability and continuity to that slow and painful progress.

  J. William Fulbright

  Powerful, Inspiration, Civilization

  "The Legislator". Lecture delivered at the University of Chicago; in "The Works of the Mind" by Robert B. Heywood, edition for the University's Committee on Social Thought (1947), p. 119, 1946.

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• As every parent knows, children go through an adolescent growth spurt, during which they put on inches at an alarming rate. Humans are unique in this respect: most mammalian species, including apes, progress almost directly from infancy to adulthood.

  Richard Leakey

  Children, Unique, Parent

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• My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place [cell 54 of Cairo Central Prison] taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never, therefore, make any progress.

  Anwar Sadat

  Cells, Fabric, Cairo

  Anwar Sadat (1978). “In Search of Identity: An Autobiography”, New York : Harper & Row

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• The Alliance for Progress is an alliance between one millionaire and many beggars.

  Fidel Castro

  Alliances, Millionaire, Beggar

  Interview with C. L. Sulzberger, November 7, 1964.

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• An accurate charting of American women's progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time-but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal.

  Susan Faludi

  Curves, Rights, Goal

  Susan Faludi (1991). “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women”

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