Motivational Quotes

Progress

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

- Sizoo, Joseph R.

Best Quotes about Progress

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

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

Plato

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

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

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.

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

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

Chisholm, Shirley Anita

10.

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

Ogden Nash

11.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

12.

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

Sizoo, Joseph R.

13.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

14.

All progress is experimental.

Chapman, John Jay

15.

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.

16.

A process which led from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress -- though whether the amoebae would agree with this opinion is not known.

Russell, Bertrand

17.

Once an organization loses its spirit of pioneering and rests on its early work, its progress stops.

Watson, Thomas J.

18.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

19.

Nothing recedes like progress.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

20.

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.

Miller, Henry

21.

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

Orwell, George

22.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

23.

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

Grenfell, Joyce

24.

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

Addams, Jane

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

You can't say that civilization don't advance... for in every war they kill you a new way.

Rogers, Will

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Allen, Charles M.

32.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

33.

A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.

Grey, Bill

34.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

Kraus, Karl

39.

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

40.

Today's progress was yesterday's plan.

41.

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

42.

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back.

Lincoln, Abraham

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Perot, H. Ross

46.

Progress is the stride of God.

Hugo, Victor

47.

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

Havelock Ellis

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Renan, Ernest