Progress Quotes

We have collected and put the best progress quotes about the meaning of life from around the world. Enjoy reading these insights and feel free to share this page on your social media to inspire others.

May these progress quotes on many subjects inspire you to never give up and keep working towards your goals. Who knows—success could be just around the corner.

Progress is the movement towards a refined, improved, or otherwise desired state or, in the context of progressivism, the idea that advancements in technology, science, and social organization can result in an improved human condition; the latter may happen as a result of direct human action, as in social enterprise or through activism, or as a natural part of sociocultural evolution.

A nation’s development and progress depends upon the intellectual and spiritual training given to the people who live within its borders. A nation whose members are lacking in intellectual and spiritual development should not be expected to develop and progress. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Nations begin to move backward when they allow once-cultivated fields to be neglected, and turn vineyards and gardens into rubbish heaps. Fertilizing barren soil and then cultivating it so that it becomes a vineyard and a garden is progress. A developed country’s lands consist of gardens, its mountains have vineyards, and its places of worship are like magnificent palaces. In contrast, the cities of an underdeveloped country are ruins, its streets are rubbish heaps, and its places of worship are left to decay as moldy halls. – M. Fethullah Gulen

When something has been improved, it becomes cleaner and brighter, better and more orderly than it formerly were. Accordingly, being content with things as they are indicates a lack of effort, while true progress is the realization of improvements. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Each advance forward appears first as a concept. Then, the mass of people are persuaded to accept it. Finally, it is put into practice by those united in heart and mind. Every attempt to make progress that is not based on reason and science is futile. – M. Fethullah Gulen

It is a condition for national development that the nation’s people have the same goal. A nation cannot develop and progress, although it shows great activity, if some of its members say “black” and others say “white” for the same thing. – M. Fethullah Gulen

A community that has not educated its people in a shared tradition eventually splits into different groups based on their different knowledge and upbringing. These groups will be hostile to each other. It is impossibly difficult for such a fractured community to progress. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Although education is undeniably important for a country’s development, the expected results will never be achieved if the young people are not educated according to the country’s traditional values. – M. Fethullah Gulen

For true and beneficial progress to me made, people must evaluate the present conditions and use the experience of former generations intelligently. If coming generations do not learn from the experience of their predecessors, and each generation follows its own way, the nation will begin to move backward instead of forward. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Every flood comes from tiny drops whose existence and size are neglected. Gradually, it reaches a level that cannot be resisted. A society’s body is always open to such types of flood. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Don’t let pride ever cause you to stumble,
Baby steps are still progress and keep us humble.
It’s better to move slowly then to turn or hide,
Keep your eyes focused, let God be your guide. – J. Allen Shaw

Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first. – Frederick B. Wilcox

Progress changes consciousness, and when people’s consciousness changes, then their awareness of what is possible changes as well a virtuous circle. – Bill Clinton

Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. – Leo Tolstoy

Progress is a set of assumptions. – Anonymous

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. – George Bernard Shaw

Progress is not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be. – Khalil Gibran

Progress is not inevitable. It’s up to us to create it. – Anonymous

Progress isn’t made through fear. … Fear is the coward’s way of leadership. – Michelle Obama

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be. – Anonymous

Progress not perfection. – Court McGee

Progress not perfection… you can’t be perfect everything… but you can gain progress on a daily basis. – Court McGee

Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves. – Julia Cameron

Progression is the essence of what makes you stronger, leaner and more fit. – Matt Schifferle

A lack of focus leads to a lack of progress. Focus. Grind. Grow. – Anonymous

A little progress every day adds up to big results. – Satya

A person with a clear purpose will make progress on even the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress on even the smoothest road. – Thomas Carlyle

A work in progress. And the possibilities are endless. – Elizabeth Eulberg

A work-in-progress generates its own energy field. You, the artist or entrepreneur, are pouring love into the work; you are suffusing it with passion and intention and hope. – Steven Pressfield

Actively recognizing progress towards your goal will ultimately end up inspiring you and have you pushing even harder. – Denzel J. Wellington

Addicted to progress. – Anonymous

All creativity is a work in progress. – Dean Cavanagh

All progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw

All progress is experimental. – John Jay Chapman

All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. – Anonymous

All progress takes place outside the comfort zone. – Michael John Bobak

Allow yourself to be proud of yourself and all the progress you’ve made. Especially the progress that no one else can see. – Anonymous

Always be a work in progress. – Emily Lillian

As I am a work in progress, you shall see me more or less? Don’t shake me out if I digress. As of me less, from me more of my work, I guess. – Ana Claudia Antunes

As time progresses, increase the amount of time spent for self-improvement, and less time on the mental junk food. Create a healthy balance, it’s no different than indulging in some cake here and there. Moderation, moderation, moderation! – Curt Hinson

Baby steps count, as long as you are going forward. You add them all up, and one day you look back and you’ll be surprised at where you might get to. – Chris Gardner

Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still. – Chinese Proverb

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. – Franz Kafk

Can you imagine what a pessimist who lived only 200 years ago would think about the world we live in? Airplanes, electricity, automobiles, television, remote controls, the Internet, fax machines, telephones, cellular phones, and so on – and all available to us because of that spark of open-mindedness that allowed progress, growth, and creativity to flourish. – Wayne Dyer

Challenges, failures, defeats and ultimately, progress, are what make your life worthwhile. – Maxime Lagace

Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. – Henry Steele Commager

Comfort is the enemy of progress. – P. T. Barnum

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is a success. – Henry Ford

Consider what a long way you’ve come. – Anonymous

Courage means to keep making forward progress while you still feel afraid. – Joyce Meyer

Delay is the enemy of progress. – Eliot Spitzer

Despite our deeply rooted prejudices against ‘filthy lucre’, however, money is the root of most progress. – Niall Ferguson

Determine a single measure that you can use to grade your progress and success in each area of your life. Refer to it daily. – Brian Tracy

Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress. – Alfred A. Montapert

Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress. – Anonymous

Don’t compare your progress to that of others. We need our own time to travel our own distance. – Anonymous

Doubt increases with inaction. Clarity reveals itself in momentum. Growth comes from progress. For all these reasons, BEGIN. – Brendon Burchard

Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family. – Kofi Annan

Every day that is wasted by doing nothing that makes your life better is an absolute waste. If you decide that you would rather go to the movies, watch TV, or go out with your friends that is a choice you make not to further your own progress. This is not to say that there isn’t a place for relaxation but relaxation is not to be used as an excuse not to move forward. – Byron Pulsifer

Every difficult goal that, at first, may be viewed as an insurmountable obstacle can be resolved when you implement a strategy that requires only one-step at a time. Each action taken moves you forward, continuous progress is seen, and the final goal is closer and closer until it is accomplished. – Byron Pulsifer

Every step of progress which the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake. – Wendell Phillips

Every time we made progress we did it by challenging the conventional wisdom. – Ed Miliband

Everybody’s a work in progress. I’m a work in progress. I mean, I’ve never arrived. I’m still learning all the time. – Renee Fleming

Excellence without effort is as futile as progress without preparation. – William Arthur Ward

Failure is success in progress. – Albert Einstein

First steps are always the hardest but until they are taken the notion of progress remains only a notion and not an achievement. – Anonymous

Focus on progress not perfection. – Bill Phillips

Focus on your progress, not your goals. – Anna Barnes

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

Great steps in human progress are made by things that don’t work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don’t, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress. – Charles Kettering

Happiness is not a finished product, it is a work in progress. – Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it. – Salvador Dali

Have you ever needed to do a thorough cleaning of your home, only to find out that you just can’t get inspired until you start a bit of it? That’s because progress is going to help you improve your motivation, and in truth, progress is the greatest motivator. – Monica Bell

Healthy discontent is the prelude to progress. – Mahatma Gandhi

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress. – Gandhi

However, it is one thing to be consumed by your future financial goals, and another thing to be making progress and enjoying the process with a more balanced life by doing what brings you joy. – Maggie Thompson

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goals requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. – Martin Luther King

I am a slow walker, but I never walk back. – Abraham Lincoln

I am a work in progress dressed in the fabric of a world unfolding. – Ani DiFranco

I believe that no matter what situation in life you find yourself, there is room for you to take control of little things, which ultimately adds up to big things. – Lisa J. Shultz

I consider myself a student of many religions. The more I learn, the more questions I have. For me, the spiritual quest will be a life-long work in progress. – Dan Brown

I have followed many a weary mile behind a plough and I know all the drudgery of it. When very young I suspected that much might somehow be done in a better way. – Henry Ford

I receive a blessing every time the missionaries we support report progress in their ministry, and when they count the new believers, I rejoice joining with the legions of angels. – Pat Gelsinger

I walk slowly, but I never walk backward. – Anonymous

I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy. – Marie Curie

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. – Frederick Douglass

If we heed Martin Luther King’s call today, we can launch a struggle that can catapult our nation into a new century of even more exciting progress toward the ideal of peace with social justice. Dorothy F. Cotton, Why We Can’t Wait. – Martin Luther King Jr.

If you ruled out partial successes, there would be no progress at all. – Robert Brault

If you want to experience significant progress toward your goal, you need to be intentional about the work you’re doing every day. – Anonymous

If you’re climbing the ladder of life, you go rung by rung, one step at a time. Don’t look too far up, set your goals high but take one step at a time. Sometimes you don’t think you’re progressing until you step back and see how high you’ve really gone. – Donny Osmond

If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress. – Barack Obama

If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress. – Barack Obama

In recovering from our creative blocks, it is necessary to go gently and slowly… These are baby steps. Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves. – Julia Cameron

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop. – Confucius

It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off! You cannot make progress without making decisions. – Jim Rohn

It is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. – Larry Page

It’s not about success, it’s about progress. – Anthony Robbins

It’s so easy to fall down a rabbit hole of distractions and side conversations, but the very act of tracking your time makes it less likely for you to fall. – Sanya Weathers

I’m a work in progress. I’m trying to be better. – Nate Parker

Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress. – Theodore Levitt

Just as the tension of the wind against the sail causes the sailboat to move, so stress is necessary for us to progress through life. – Vivian Eisenecher

Kids react positively when praise follows positive effort and earned progress. – Jacquie McTaggart

Landmarks of our lives represent places we have been and experiences we have had which have affected our lives. As we look back on our lives and identify specific events that have affected our progress, we will find sign posts pointing us toward God’s purpose for our lives. – William Johnson

Life is a progress and not a station. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is short and progress is slow. – Anonymous

Little by little becomes a lot. – Anonymous

Little by little one walks far. – Peruvian Proverb

Little by little, a little becomes a lot. – Anonymous

Little drops of water wear down big stones. – Russian proverb

Make measurable progress in reasonable time. – Jim Rohn

Moving forward first requires a step to be taken. – Chase S.M. Neill

Music is a work in progress. On a record, it gets frozen in time. And it’s oddly unnatural. – Linda Ronstadt

Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow. – Plato

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream. – Malcolm Muggeridge

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress. – Nicholas M. Butler

Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress. – Frank Pittman

Part of life is understanding that real change and progress comes with dedicated perseverance but also realizing that challenges, obstacles and roadblocks will appear from time to time. – Robert Rivers

Passion. Purpose. Progress. – Anonymous

Peace of mind comes from knowing that this too shall pass and good progress comes from good habits. – Brendon Burchard

People and relationships never stop being a work in progress. – Nora Roberts

Perfection is both innate and a work in progress. – Rasheed Ogunlaru

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. – Vince Lombardi

Personal growth is about progress, not perfection. – Hal Elrod

Problems are the price of progress. Don’t bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me. – Charles Kettering

Procrastination can be categorized as habit, and that habit, if continued repeatedly and turned into a life style, transforms into a bad habit that can pull us back from progress and delay our success. – Mark Thomas

Remember that progress would be impossible if we always did things the way we always have. – Wayne Dyer

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

Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress. – Thomas Edison

Restlessness and discontent are the necessities of progress. – Thomas Edison

Since the days our grandfathers were born, we’ve invented television, the computer, the Internet, the iPod, the cell phone, the flu shot, hybrid cars, the GPS … all of us were born in homes with electricity and indoor plumbing, and many of our grandfathers, as boys, were still finding their way by kerosene lamps and using outhouses. You’d think all of this progress would have made us a smarter, safer, more sustainable society. And yet we’ve somehow lost our way. – Erin Bried

Slow progress is better than no progress. – Anonymous

Slow, steady progress is better than daily excuses. – Robin Sharma

Small progress is still progress. – Anonymous

Some quit due to slow progress. Never grasping the fact that slow progress is progress. – Jeff Olson

Strive for progress, not perfection. – Anonymous

Success is steady progress toward one’s personal goals. – Jim Rohn

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. – Anonymous

Thanks to technological progress, economies have not only grown, they have also transformed – producing very different output, in very different ways, at different moments in history. – Daniel Susskind

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. – Anonymous

The goal is progress, not perfection! – Kathy Freston

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier. – Bill Gates

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. – Gandhi

The moment a man ceases to progress, to grow higher, wider and deeper, then his life becomes stagnant. – Orison S. Marden

The most important thing is to make decisions. Whether the decision is right or wrong is secondary. You will soon receive feedback that will help you to progress. – Marc Reklau

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. – Anonymous

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. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

The wise are like a river; they go forward and upward, never backward or downward. – Matshona Dhliwayo

The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress. – Charles Kettering

There are only two options: Make progress or make excuses. – Anonymous

There can be no progress nor achievement without sacrifice. – James Allen

Through substitute activities, therapy, and hard work, grieving individuals can work through their anger and progress to live more balanced lives. – Valerie Orr

Time and again, I’ve seen people make the most progress when they combine their knowledge of themselves with real world actions. – Alison Cardy

To get happier, try gratitude, giving back, savoring, encouraging your optimism, and celebrating progress. – Jonathan Harnum

To make progress, to reach towards our dreams, we need supporters, role models who are encouraging. – Rebecca Jane

To move forward, you must first take a step. – Chase S.M. Neill

Today’s progress was yesterday’s plan. – Anonymous

Too much looking backward … is bad for progress. – Anonymous

True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice. – St. Francis of Assisi

Unless we progress, we regress. – Anonymous

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. – C. S. Lewis

We are making a step. It’s just a baby step but it’s a step. – Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

We are not at the end of our progress but at the beginning. We have but reached the shores of a great unexplored continent. We cannot turn back . . . It is man’s destiny to ponder on the riddle of existence and, as a by-product of his wonderment, to create a new life on this earth. – Charles Kettering

We’re all a beautiful, wonderful work in progress….Embrace the process! – Nanette Mathews

We’re not perfect. We’re a work in progress. But man, America has gotten a lot of things right. – Donna Edwards

What was astonishing to me is something that should be more apparent to all of us: the exercises that caused people to increase their progress dramatically were those that took the pressure off, those that did away with the crippling perfectionism that caused people to quit their goals. Whether they were trying to lose a pants size, write more content on a blog, or get a raise, the results were the same. The less that people aimed for perfect, the more productive they became. – Jon Acuff

Whatever you do you have to keep moving forward. – Martin Luther King

When you set out to accomplish something, recognize that slow, steady progress over time can lead to big success. – Erica Hudson

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. – Benjamin Franklin

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible. – Frank Zappa

Work hard for you and your own goals. Progress will come. – Anonymous

You are a work in progress; which means you get there a little at a time, not all at once. – Unknown

You don’t need to stick to tough rules or overnight changes; you need not rely on hardcore discipline that makes you hate your life. You need only focus on progress, not perfection. Lean in to the process of losing weight, and it will happen easily. – Kathy Freston

You need to place the right people in your life, and you need to make sure that the way in which you live your life and the environment in which you do is in and of itself is one that is conducive to your progress, and if it’s not, you need to do everything within your power to change it. – Rachel Rebecca Wisdom

You’re allowed to be both a masterpiece and a work in progress simultaneously. – Sophia Bush

You’re always a work in progress. Flexibility. Personality. Motivation. There’s always room to improve. – Chalene Johnson

Quotes From Wikiquote

• The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.
  • Felix Adler, Life and Destiny (1913), Section 8: Suffering and Consolation

• If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1971), p. 55

• The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
  • On the subject progress. Source: Interview with French writer Roger Errera, 1974. New York Review of Books. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

• Those who look forward to a period of continuous and, so to speak, inevitable progress, are bound to assign some more solid reason for their convictions than a merely empirical survey of the surface lessons of history. …Humanity, civilisation, progress itself, must have a tendency to mitigate the harsh methods by which Nature has wrought out the variety and the perfection of organic life.
  • Arthur Balfour, A Fragment on Progress (1891)

• Humanity, in the aggregate, is progressing, and philanthropy looks forward hopefully.
  • Hosea Ballou, as quoted in Edge-Tools of Speech (1886) by Maturin M. Ballou, p. 397

• 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 (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.
  • Pope Benedict XVI, in Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi, 30 November 2007, Chapter 22

• Progress is only possible by passing from a state of undifferentiated wholeness to differentiation of parts.
  • Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory, 1968, p. 69

• For Darwinism there is nothing in the world like value or good or evil. Anything implying evolution, in the ordinary sense of development or progress, is wholly rejected. But… there is a coincidence between that which prevails and that which satisfies. …Whatever idea satisfies or prevails (no matter what else it is) is true.
  Darwinism often recommends itself because confused with a doctrine of evolution which is different radically. Humanity is taken in that doctrine as a real being, or even as the one real being, and Humanity advances continuously. Its history is development and progress to a goal because the type and character in which its reality consists is gradually brought more and more into existence. That which is strongest on the whole must therefore be good, and the ideas that come to prevail must therefore be true. This doctrine, which possesses my sympathy, though I certainly cannot accept it, has, I suppose, now for a century taken its place in the thought of Europe. For good or evil it more or less dominates or sways our minds to an extent of which most of us, perhaps, are dangerously unaware.
  • F. H. Bradley (1846 –1924) “On Some Aspects of Truth,” as quoted in Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (2011)

• Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. …it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most nonscientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. …by the time science becomes a closed—that is, computerizable—project, it is not science anymore. It is not in the area of the exploration of errors.
  • Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

• What is art
  But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
  When, graduating up in a spiral line
  Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
  It pushed toward the intense significance
  Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
  Art’s life — and where we live, we suffer and toil.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), Book IV, line 1150

• By the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young; but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

• A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow, time enough to consider it when it becomes to-day.
  • Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Kenelm Chillingly : His Adventures and Opinions (1873), Book I, Ch. 8

• Science has been advancing without interruption during the last three of four hundred years; every new discovery has led to new problems and new methods of solution, and opened up new fields for exploration. Hitherto men of science have not been compelled to halt, they have always found ways to advance further. But what assurance have we that they will not come up against impassable barriers? …Take biology or astronomy. How can we be sure that some day progress may not come to a dead pause, not because knowledge is exhausted, but because our resources for investigation are exhausted. … It is an assumption, which cannot be verified, that we shall not reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human intellect is unqualified to pass.
  • J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (1921) Introduction

• The doubts that Mr. Balfour expressed nearly thirty years ago, in an Address delivered in Glasgow, have not, so far, been answered. And it is probable that many people, to whom six years ago the notion of a sudden decline or break-up of our western civilisation, as a result not of cosmic forces but of its own development, would have appeared almost fantastic, will feel much less confident to-day, notwithstanding the fact that the leading nations of the world have instituted a league of peoples for the prevention of war, the measure to which so many high priests of Progress have looked forward as meaning a long stride forward on the road to Utopia.
  • John Bagnell Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (1921) referring to Arthur Balfour’s A Fragment on Progress (1891)

• Within any city or state or civilization… the natural operation of time was to produce internal corruption… a process of decandence. [I]n a parallel manner… bodies would decompose and the finest fabrics in nature would suffer putrefaction. …compound bodies had a natural tendency to disintegrate. …[A]t the Renaissance it was almost less possible to believe in what we call progress than it was in the middle ages. If anything it was more easy to believe of something of this sort in the realm of spiritual matters than in any other sphere—to believe in stages of time succeeding one another in an ascending series… and so to find meaning and purpose in the passage of time itself.
  • Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)

• [T]he famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns—the controversy in the course of which a more modern view of progress was hammered out—is already visible at the time of the Renaissance.
  • Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)

• [A]t the close of the seventeenth century we can neither say that the idea [of progress] had been fully developed nor feel that its implications had become generalised. …Perrault …was of the opinion that there would not be many things for which the France of Louis XIV would need to envy posterity. And Fontenelle, though he was conscious of the widening vistas which the future promised to the natural sciences, was too well aware of the limitations of human nature to share the illusions of the philosophes concerning the general improvement of the world.
  • Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)

• Even in the eighteenth century certain of the prevailing ideas or prejudices are awkward to reconcile with any scheme of history on the basis of progress. The regard for native reason, and the view that this was liable to be perverted by institutions, led to… daydreaming about the “noble savage” and the evils of civilization… as is illustrated in the writings of Rousseau.
  • Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)

• [T]he attempt to embrace the whole course of things in time and to relate the successive epochs to one another—the transition to the view that time is actually aiming at something, that temporal succession has meaning and that the passage of ages is generative—was greatly influenced by the fact that the survey became wider than that of human history, that the mind gradually came to see geology, pre-history and history in due succession to one another. The new science and the history joined hands and each acquired a new power as a result of their mutual reinforcement. The idea of progress itself gained additional implications when there gradually emerged a wider idea of evolution.
  • Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)

• Unlike Hegel’s progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 168

• Science discovers, genius invents, industry applies, and man adapts himself to, or is molded by, new things
  • Chicago World’s Fair “A Century of Progress” of 1933, slogan

• We are either progressing or retrograding all the while; there is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life.
  • James Freeman Clarke, as quoted in Edge-Tools of Speech (1886) by Maturin M. Ballou, p. 397

• The wisest man may be wiser to-day than he was yesterday, and to-morrow than he is to-day. Total freedom from change would imply total freedom from error; but this is the prerogative of Omniscience alone. The world, however, are very censorious, and will hardly give a man credit for simplicity and singleness of heart, who is not only in the habit of changing his opinions, but also of bettering his fortunes by every change.
  • Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon: or, Many things in Few Words (1820) § 102, p. 62

• We can trace back our existence almost to a point. Former time presents us with trains of thoughts gradually diminishing to nothing. But our ideas of futurity are perpetually expanding. Our desires and our hopes, even when modified by our fears, seem to grasp at immensity. This alone would be sufficient to prove the progressiveness of our nature, and that this little earth is but a point from which we start toward a perfection of being.
  • Humphry Davy, as quoted in Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1836) by John Davy, p. 130

• Progress is man’s indifference to the lessons of history.
  • Len Deighton, An Expensive Place to Die, Jonathan Cape (1967) Ch. 39

• Since progress is the rare exception, and not the rule, among the communities of mankind, it is less important to speculate about the reasons for its cessation among the ancient Egyptians than to observe how the technological advances made in the Near East became by degrees more widely diffused until they penetrated Europe. Neither Mesopotamia nor Egypt had the resources which would have enabled it to develop its civilization on a basis of autarky. They had never been self-contained as regards timber or metals or even ivory: in the second millenium B.C. the development of larger ships and better organized land transport encouraged greater efforts to satisfy their needs by importations. In exchanging the products of their superior technology for raw materials they stimulated imitation. Moreover, in ancient as in modern times the needs of trade often stimulated the desire for conquest, which likewise left its mark upon the life of neighboring peoples long after the tide of conquest had receded. Aggression then provoked counter-aggression: some barbarian intruders were eventually absorbed into the life of the two empires, others clashed with them, and kept their independence.
  • T. K. Derry & Trevor I. Williams, A Short History of Technology: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900 (1960) Ch.1 General Historical Survey; “Mesopotamian and Egyptian Civilizations”

• The search for justice before God, the measuring of technique by other criteria than those of technique itself—these were the great obstacles that Christianity opposed to technical progress.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), p. 38

• The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “First Visit to England” in English Traits (1856)

• “Can any good come out of Nazareth?” This is always the question of the wiseacres and the knowing ones. But the good, the new, comes from exactly that quarter whence it is not looked for, and is always something different from what is expected. Everything new is received with contempt, for it begins in obscurity. It becomes a power unobserved.
  • Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, as quoted in “Voices of the New Time” as translated by C. C. Shackford in The Radical Vol. 7 (1870), p. 329

• Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.
  • Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975) p. 33

• Progress was often achieved by a “criticism from the past”…
  • Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975) p. 48

• Human improvement is from within outwards.
  • James Anthony Froude, as quoted in Edge-Tools of Speech (1886) by Maturin M. Ballou, p. 398

• The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe.
  • Buckminster Fuller, “The Wellspring of Reality,” Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

• War is obsolete. It could never have been done before. Only ten years ago… technology reached the point where it could be done. Since then the invisible technological-capability revolution has made it ever easier so to do. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. The essence of livingry is human-life advantaging and environment controlling. With the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to livingry production, all humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly successful… If realized, this historically greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented heights.
  • Buckminster Fuller in Critical Path (1981)

• I must do something to keep my thoughts fresh and growing. I dread nothing so much as falling into a rut and feeling myself becoming a fossil.
  • James A. Garfield, as quoted in Garfield’s Words : Suggestive Passages from the Public and Private Writings of James Abram Garfield (1882) edited by William Ralston Balch

• Men will become more clever and more acute, but not better, happier, and stronger in action, or at least only at epochs. I foresee the time when God will have no more joy in them, but will break up everything for a renewed creation. I am certain that everything is planned to this end, and that the time and hour are already fixed in the distant future for the occurrence of this renovating epoch. But a long time will elapse first, and we may still for thousands and thousands of years amuse ourselves in all sorts of ways on this dear old surface.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (Oct 23, 1828) as quoted in Conversations with Eckermann: Being Appreciations and Criticisms on Many Subjects (1901)

• Look up and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a hand!
  • Edward Everett Hale, Ten Times One is Ten (1870)

• Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself. And if Virgil did consider Homer such a preliminary exercise for himself and his refined age, his work has therefore remained a post-liminary exercise [Nachübung].
  • G. W. F. Hegel, Difference of the Fichtean and Schellingean System of Philosophy, in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 49

• Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.
  • Thor Heyerdahl; quoted in Richard R. Lineman, ‘Two-Way Ticket to Paradise’, book review of Thor Heyerdahl, Fatu-Hiva, in New York Times (29 Aug 1975), 58, col. 5

• The flower of humanity, captive still in its germ, will blossom out one day into the true form of man like unto God, in a state of which no man on earth can imagine the greatness and the majesty.
  • Johann Gottfried Herder, as quoted by William Ralph Inge, The Idea of Progress (1920)

• 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 (1831, 1846) Ch. VI

• There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
  • Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (1944)

• There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.
  • Aldous Huxley, “One and Many,” Do What You Will (1928), p. 16

• The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.
  • William Ralph Inge, The Idea of Progress, Romanes Lecture (1920)

• To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy. The superstition of progress had the singular good fortune to enslave at least three philosophies—those of Hegel, of Comte, and of Darwin.
  • William Ralph Inge, The Idea of Progress, Romanes Lecture (1920)

• We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
  • C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), Book I, Ch. 5

• In se magna ruunt: laetis hunc numina rebus crescendi posuere modum.
  • Great things come crashing down upon themselves – such is the limit of growth ordained by heaven for success.
    • Lucan, Pharsalia (c. 61 AD), Book I, line 81

• 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 (1867), p. 240

• The idea of progress … is that human knowledge tends continually to advance because each generation can build on the achievements of the preceding one. … Faith in progress is based on the (very un-Socratic) assumption that wisdom or knowledge can not only be taught but can be “published” in the modern sense: written down in books in such a way as to be easily and genuinely appropriated, so that the next generation, after a brief period of learning, can begin where the previous one left off.A second, related assumption of modern progress-philosophy is that intellectual production functions in essentially the same way as economic production: the progress of both results from “teamwork,” from the practice of the division of labor or specialization within a group. And just as the essential precondition of the economic division of labor is exchange, so the precondition of intellectual specialization is the efficient exchange of knowledge—through publication.In the modern period, the whole enterprise of philosophy and science has been organized around this idea of progress. The pursuit of knowledge has become uniquely “socialized,” become a team effort, a collective undertaking, both across generations and across individuals within a single generation. This has affected our whole experience of the intellectual life. The modern scholar or scientist ultimately does not—and cannot—live to think for himself in the quiet of his study. He lives to “make a contribution” to an ongoing, public enterprise, to what “we know.” And at the core of this effort at collective knowing is the modern institution of publication.
  • Arthur Melzer, “On the Pedagogical Motive for Esoteric Writing,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 69, Issue 4, November 2007

• There was once a time when the life of men resembled that of beasts. They dwelt in mountain caves and dark ravines, for as yet there was no roofed house nor broad city fortified with stone towers. Nor did the curved ploughs cleave the black clod, nurse of the grain, nor the busy iron tend the fruitful rows of bacchic vines, but earth was barren. In mutual slaughter they dined on food of flesh. But when time, begetter and nurturer of all things, wrought a change in mortal life—whether of the solicitude of Prometheus, or from necessity, or by long experience, offering nature itself as teacher—then was discovered holy Demeter’s gift, the nourishment of cultivated grain, and the sweet fount of Bacchus. The earth, once barren, began to be ploughed by yoked oxen, towered cities arose, men built sheltering homes and turned their lives from savage ways to civilized. From this time they made it a law to bury the dead or give unburied bodies their portion of dust, leaving no visible reminder of their former impious feasts.
  • Moschion (ca. 3rd century BC) as quoted by W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Vol. 3, “The Fifth Century Enlightenment” (1971) from an unknown play “in the spirit of the late fifth of fourth century BC.”

• The very reason [the Greeks] got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbors precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry but rather using everything we learn as a foothold which will take us up as high, and higher, than our neighbor.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Marianne Cowan trans., p. 30

• We are too fond of clapping ourselves upon the back because we live in modern times, and we preen ourselves quite ridiculously [and unnecessarily] on our modern progress. There is, of course, such a thing as modern progress, but it has been won at how great a cost. How many precious things have we flung from us to lighten ourselves for that race. And in some diiections (sic) we have progressed not at all. or we have progressed in a circle. Perhaps, indeed, all progress on this planet, and on every planet, is in a circle, just as every line you draw on a globe is a circle or part of one. Modern speculation is often a mere groping where ancient men saw clearly.
  • Patrick Pearse, The Murder Machine, Section IV: Against Modernism
• The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities—perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.
  • Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) Ch. 1 “Science : Conjectures and Refutations”

• 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.
  • Joseph Ratzinger, Saved by Hope (2007), § 22

• Should the nebular hypothesis ever be established, then it will become manifest that the universe at large, like every organism, was once homogeneous; that as a whole, and in every detail, it has unceasingly advanced toward greater heterogeneity; and that its heterogeneity is still increasing. It will be seen that as in each event of to-day, so from the beginning, the decomposition of every expended force into several forces has been perpetually producing a higher complication; that the increase in heterogeneity so brought about is still going on, and must continue to go on: and that this progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity.
  • Herbert Spencer, “Progress, Its Law and Cause” (1857) reprinted in Select Works of Herbert Spencer (1886)

• [P]rogress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information…
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001) Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History — Distilled Thinking On Your Palm Pilot — Breaking News

• Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010) Preludes, p.7.

• Philosophy hasn’t made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 98

• Westward the star of empire takes its way.
  • John Quincy Adams, Oration at Plymouth (1802). Misquoted from Berkeley on inside cover of an early edition of Bancroft’s History of United States.

• Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time.
  • Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts

• Westward the course of empire takes its way;
  The four first Acts already past,
  A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
  Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
  • Bishop Berkeley, Verses, on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America

• Finds progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
  Not God’s, and not the beast’s;
  God is, they are,
  Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.
  • Robert Browning, A Death in the Desert

• Progress is
  The law of life, man is not
  Man as yet.
  • Robert Browning, Paracelsus, Part V

• Like plants in mines, which never saw the sun,
  But dream of him, and guess where he may be,
  And do their best to climb, and get to him.
  • Robert Browning, Paracelsus, last page

• Hombre apercebido medio combatido.
  • A man prepared has half fought the battle.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 2. 17

• All things journey: sun and moon,
  Morning, noon, and afternoon,
  Night and all her stars;
  Twixt the east and western bars
  Round they journey,
  Come and go!
  We go with them!
  • George Eliot, Spanish Gypsy (1868), Book III. Song

• And striving to be Man, the worm
  Mounts through all the spires of form.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mayday

• So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
  • Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Introductory. The Problem

• Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• He who moves not forward goes backward!
  A capital saying!
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman and Dorothea, Canto III, line 66

• To look up and not down,
  To look forward and not back,
  To look out and not in—and
  To lend a hand.
  • Edward Everett Hale, Rule of the “Harry Wadsworth Club”, from Ten Times One is Ten (1870), Chapter IV

• I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before.
  • Gerald Stanley Lee, Crowds (1913), Part II, Chapter III

• From lower to the higher next,
  Not to the top, is Nature’s text;
  And embryo good, to reach full stature,
  Absorbs the evil in its nature.
  • James Russell Lowell, Festina Lente. Moral

• New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth;
  They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.
  • James Russell Lowell, Present Crisis

• “Spiral” the memorable Lady terms
  Our mind’s ascent.
  • George Meredith, The World’s Advance. G. M. Trevelyan in notes to Meredith’s Poetical Works says the “memorable Lady” is Mrs. Browning

• That in our proper motion we ascend
  Up to our native seat; descent and fall
  To us is adverse.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book II, line 75

• Quod sequitur, fugio; quod fugit, usque sequor.
  • What follows I flee; what flees I ever pursue.
  • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), II. 19, 36

• Vogue la galère.
  • Row on [whatever happens].
  • François Rabelais, Gargantua, I. 3

• Il est un terme de la vie au-delà duquel en rétrograde en avançant.
  • There is a period of life when we go back as we advance.
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, II

• The march of intellect.
  • Robert Southey, Sir T. More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, Volume II, p. 361. Quoted by Carlyle, Miscel. Essays, Volume I, p. 162. (Ed. 1888)

• L’esprit humain fait progrès toujours, mais c’est progrès en spirale.
  • The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.
  • Madame de Staël

• If you strike a thorn or rose,
  Keep a-goin’!
  If it hails or if it snows,
  Keep a-goin’!
  ‘Tain’t no use to sit and whine
  ‘Cause the fish ain’t on your line;
  Bait you hook an’ keep on tryin’,
  Keep a-goin’!
  • Frank L. Stanton, Keep a-goin

• When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
  • Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, 37

• The stone that is rolling, can gather no moss.
  • Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. Huswifely Admonitions. Gosson—Ephemendes of Phialo. Marston—The Faun. Syrus—Maxims. 524. Pierre volage ne queult mousse. De l’hermite qui se désepéra pour le larron que ala en paradis avant que lui. 13th Cent

• Qui n’a pas l’esprit de son âge,
  De son âge a tout le malheur.
  • He who has not the spirit of his age, has all the misery of it.
  • Voltaire, Lettre à Cideville

• Press on!—”for in the grave there is no work
  And no device”—Press on! while yet ye may!
  • Nathaniel Parker Willis, from a poem delivered at Yale College (1827), line 45

• The advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.
  • Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, U.S. commissioner of patents, Annual Report, p. 5 (1843)

• According to the ancient Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step”.
  • John F. Kennedy, radio and television address to the American people on the nuclear test ban treaty, July 26, 1963. The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 606

• I walk slowly, but I never walk backward.
  • Attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Representative Everett M. Dirksen, remarks in the House, September 18, 1941, Congressional Record, vol. 87, p. 7479. Reported as unverified in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953). He may have been paraphrasing this: “I hope to ‘stand firm’ enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country’s cause”. President Lincoln, letter to Zachariah Chandler, November 20, 1863. Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 24

• Next came the Patent laws. These began in England in 1624; and, in this country, with the adoption of our constitution. Before then [these?], any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.
  • Abraham Lincoln, second lecture on discoveries and inventions, delivered to the Phi Alpha Society of Illinois College at Jacksonville, Illinois, February 11, 1859; in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 3, p. 357

• The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place. Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilisation of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to remove national and provincial antipathies, and to bind together all the branches of the great human family.
  • Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, 5th ed., vol. 1, chapter 3, p. 370 (1849). “Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for civilization” was inscribed on one side of the Golden Door of the Transportation Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893

• Expositions are the timekeepers of progress.
  • William McKinley, speech delivered at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, September 5, 1901. Modern Eloquence, ed. Ashley H. Thorndike, rev. Adam Ward, vol. 11, p. 401 (1936). This was McKinley’s last speech, as he was mortally wounded the next day at the Exposition. He served in Congress 1877–1884 and 1885–1891

• Two conditions render difficult this historic situation of mankind: It is full of tremendously deadly armament, and it has not progressed morally as much as it has scientifically and technically.
  • Pope Paul VI, sermon at the Shrine of Fatima, Portugal, May 13, 1967, as reported by The New York Times, May 14, 1967, p. 47

• I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
  • Attributed to Petronius. Robert Townsend, Up the Organization, p. 162 (1970). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989). See Charlton Ogburn.

• Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end,… We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden, chapter 1, p. 67 (1966). Originally published in 1854

• The day of large profits is probably past. There may be room for further intensive, but not extensive, development of industry in the present area of civilization.
  • Carroll D. Wright, U.S. commissioner of labor. Industrial Depressions, first annual report of the U.S. Bureau of Labor, 1885, chapter 3, p. 257. House Executive Doc. 497#150;1, part 5