Motivational Quotes

Progress

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

Best Quotes about Progress

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

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

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

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

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.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

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

Proverb, Chinese

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Nash, Ogden

17.

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

Watson, Thomas J.

18.

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

19.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

Grenfell, Joyce

21.

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

Orwell, George

22.

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

Miller, Henry

23.

Today's progress was yesterday's plan.

24.

Progress is the stride of God.

Hugo, Victor

25.

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

26.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?

Lec, Stanislaw J.

27.

All progress is experimental.

Chapman, John Jay

28.

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

29.

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

Havelock Ellis

30.

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

31.

Nothing recedes like progress.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

37.

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

38.

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

Plato

39.

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

40.

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

Pantanjali

41.

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

Allen, Charles M.

42.

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

43.

New roads; new ruts.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

44.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

45.

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

46.

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

Ogden Nash

47.

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

Roth, Philip

48.

With every passing hour, our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.

Ferm, Ransom K.

49.

When a blind man carries a lame man both go forward.

Proverb, Swedish

50.

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

Rogers, Will