PROGRESS QUOTES IV

quotations about progress

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


Human progress is not an uninterrupted march forward. It is a slow and devious movement with haltings and twistings. The pathway of man ascends and descends, wanders off into mazes. At times the trail seems to lose itself in the wilderness of human passion and folly. But inch by inch it goes forward with halting steps.

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON

The Nation and the Ethics of War and Preparedness: An Address

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Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A Treatise on Parents and Children

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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

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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"

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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

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The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

FRANK HERBERT

Dune

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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


Too much looking backward ... is bad for progress.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

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There is a subtle danger in a man thinking that he is "fixed" for life. It indicates that the next jolt of the wheel of progress is going to fling him off.

HENRY FORD

My Life and Work

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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

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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 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

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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

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Unless we progress, we regress.

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

State of the Union Address, January 9, 1959

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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

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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


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

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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

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The more thou dost advance, the more thy feet pitfalls will meet.

HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY

The Theosophist