Progress Quotes - Page 39

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

  Arthur Bloch

  Long, Enough, Break

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• It's 2003. Why can't I teleport?

  Lewis Black

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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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• 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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• A sadhak (one who does spiritual practice) will not have time to indulge in gossip. They will not feel like talking to anyone in a harsh manner. Those who always indulge in faultfinding will never achieve spiritual progress. Do not harm anyone by thoughts, words or deeds. Be compassionate towards all beings. Ahimsa (nonviolence) is the highest dharma (duty).

  Mata Amritanandamayi

  Spiritual, Talking, Practice

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• I have no absolute right to my wealth; it comes from my ancestors, my parents and from the billions of people who have worked before me to learn, to develop, to create the foundations and wealth of this planet. It is my turn to contribute to the progress of humanity. I will be grateful for anything I am paid in return.

  Robert Muller

  Grateful, People, Parent

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• Class war is not the cause of social progress; it is a disease developed in the course of social progress. The cause of the disease is the inability to subsist, and the result of the disease is war.

  Sun Yat-sen

  War, Class, Society

  Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1928). “San Min Chu I”

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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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• 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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• What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life

  Octavio Paz

  Views, Civilization, Differences

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• Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  World, Good Health, Duty

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• There is no progress in art.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Art

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• Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their time. I am glad and thankful that this was my case.

  Emmeline Pankhurst

  Struggle, Men, Parent

  Emmeline Pankhurst (2016). “My Own Story”, p.9, The Floating Press

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• I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

  Donald Barthelme

  Art, Thinking, Purpose

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• Try to gather the strength to live as brother and sister after one or two children are born. This is essential for reaping the full benefit of spiritual practice and to make spiritual progress through mental restraint.

  Mata Amritanandamayi

  Relationship, Spiritual, Brother

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• But I think we need to remember that democracy everywhere is by its nature incomplete, a work in progress.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Thinking, Democracy, Needs

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• When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book.

  Mahmoud Darwish

  Book, Firsts

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• Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.

  Julian Baggini

  Challenges, Get Better, Important

  "In praise of cynicism" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. July 10, 2013.

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• It is time that capital and labor realized that their interests are really comutual, as interdependent as the brain and the body; time they ceased their fratricidal strife and, uniting their mighty forces under the flag of Progress, completed the conquest of the world and doomed Poverty, Ignorance and Vice... Unless labor is employed, capital cannot increase - it cannot concentrate. Unless property rights are held inviolable and capital thereby encouraged to high enterprise, labor is left without a lever with which to lift itself to perfect life and must sink back to barbarism.

  William Cowper Brann

  Ignorance, Rights, Perfect

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• Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  World, Superstitions, Enlightening

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.310, Library of Alexandria

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• Progress can be slow and gradual. Continue putting in effort with patience, enthusiasm and faith.

  Mata Amritanandamayi

  Effort, Meditation, Enthusiasm

  Twitter post from Jul 17, 2014

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• But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.

  Nikola Tesla

  Powerful, Women, Civilization

  "When woman is boss". "Colliers" Magazine, January 30, 1926.

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• Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.

  Henry Ford

  Useless Things, People, Trying

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• Even a cursory reading of the book of Ecclesiastes shows that culture is a stationary bike that each generation climbs on in hopes of getting somewhere only to die and fall off so that the new young stud can take his turn peddling and, like a fool, make pronouncements about his progress. We would be wise to see postmodernity as simply the new guy on the old bike and not mistake cultural change for kingdom progress.

  Mark Driscoll

  Wise, Mistake, Book

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• The German people were not denied, however, the possibility of improving their lot by hard work over the years. Industrial growth and progress were not denied them.

  James F. Byrnes

  Hard Work, Years, People

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