Motivational Quotes

Progress

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Progress

If the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet.

Allen, Charles M.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

Orwell, George

Progress is the product of human agency. Things get better because we make them better. Things go wrong when we get too comfortable, when we fail to take risks or seize opportunities.

Susan Rice

The progress of the world is the history of men who would not permit defeat to speak the final word.

Sizoo, Joseph R.

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.

Harris, Sidney J.

Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress.

Hugo, Victor

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.

Santayana, George

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart.

Chapman, John Jay

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

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

Roth, Philip

11.

The world is moving so fast now-a-days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

Hubbard, Elbert

12.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

13.

I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.

Kaiser, Henry J.

14.

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.

Ogden Nash

15.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

Russell Baker

16.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?

Lec, Stanislaw J.

17.

The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

18.

The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.

Barbara Hall

19.

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

Plato

20.

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

Gordimer, Nadine

21.

Time advances: facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain, and penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

22.

Today's progress was yesterday's plan.

23.

Progress is mediation comes swiftly for those who try their hardest.

Pantanjali

24.

Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

Edison, Thomas A.

25.

Most people are in favor of progress, it's the changes they don't like.

26.

Progress is a tide. If we stand still we will surely be drowned. To stay on the crest, we have to keep moving.

Mayfield, Harold

27.

The pace of progress will accelerate so that even engineers and technical managers will find it necessary to recycle back through school after no more than ten years. In particular fast-moving technologies skills will become obsolete every five years or so.

Davies, Owen

28.

What we call'Progress'is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

Havelock Ellis

29.

The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.

Simms, William Gilmore

30.

Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.

Coolidge, Calvin

31.

A radical is one of whom people say He goes too far. A conservative, on the other hand, is one who doesn't go far enough. Then there is the reactionary, one who doesn't go at all. All these terms are more or less objectionable, wherefore we have

Wilson, Woodrow T.

32.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Bachelard, Gaston

33.

He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.

Colton, Charles Caleb

34.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

Picasso, Pablo

35.

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

Mumford, Lewis

37.

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

Kennedy, John F.

38.

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

Addams, Jane

39.

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

Kraus, Karl

40.

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

Curie, Madame Marie

41.

Why aren't we making any progress towards a crime-free society? We're not making progress because we are too damn busy making excuses.

42.

New roads; new ruts.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

43.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Eliot, George

44.

You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

Chisholm, Shirley Anita

45.

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

Sir Winston Churchill

46.

It takes five years to design a new car in this country. Heck, we won World War II in four years.

Perot, H. Ross

47.

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

48.

It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

49.

The simplest school boy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

Renan, Ernest

50.

Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.

Herzen, Alexander