Home / Topics / Progress Quotes

Progress Quotes

Browse 5477 quotes about Progress.

Progress Quotes

“I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths. But certainly not eliminating the natural yearnings of our species or the asking of these great questions.”

Humans Would Be Natural Religious Progress Asking Species Sake Best Things Yearning Diminish Religious Faith Eliminating Human Progress

Author:E. O. Wilson

“The Qur'an does not ask for human perfection, but rather asks that we persevere in striving for self-improvement and that we never become complacent or despondent about our progress.”

Humans Doe Self Asks Progress Self Improvement Perfection Strive Improvement Persevere Complacent Despondent

Book:Even Angels Ask: A Journey to Islam in America

Source: Even Angels Ask: A Journey to Islam in America

“Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.”

Men Firsts Humans Has Beens Hands Steps Progress Heard Majority Possession Valuable Stores Destroyed Abyss Seekers Every Step Stirring Human Progress Valuable Things Truth Seekers

Author:H. L. Mencken

“We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.”

“All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.”

Men Humans Has Beens Values Moral Progress Society Currents Skeptic Doubted Human Progress Moral Values Uncivilized

Book:Minority Report

Source: Minority Report

“There can be no richer man or woman than the individual who has found his or her labor of love. Personal fulfillment through the virtue of work is the highest form of desire. Work is the conduit between the supply and the demand of all human needs, the forerunner of human progress, and the medium by which the imagination is given the wings of action. A labor of love is exalted because it provides joy and self-expression to those who perform it.”

Source: What Makes the Great Great: Strategies for Extraordinary Achievement

“All the important human advances that we know of since historical times began have been due to individuals of whom the majority faced virulent public opposition.”

Knows Humans Has Beens Important Individual Progress Majority Historical Dues Opposition

Author:Bertrand Russell

“The free intellect is the chief engine of human progress.”

Humans Progress Intellect Chiefs Engines Human Progress

Book:Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919-22

Source: Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919-22

“Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?.”

Ifs Humans Wells Universe Individual Human Beings Progress Evolution Fundamentals Series Desirable Permanence Hallmark Flux Alterations Stasis

Book:Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Source: Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.”

World Humans Has Beens Ideas Past Order Culture Community Quality Progress This World Changed Return Notion New World Units Society And Culture

Book:Uncommon Sense

Source: Uncommon Sense

“If a man has lived in a tradition which tells him that nothing can be done about his human condition, to believe that progress is possible may well be the greatest revolution of all.”

Ifs Men Believe Humans Wells May Done Progress Conditions Revolution Tradition Human Condition

Author:Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’re ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.”

People Thinking Life Humans Persons Life Is Change Human Beings Mistake Psychology Our Lives Progress Right Now Constant Finished Temporary Fleeting Transient Work In Progress

Author:Daniel Gilbert

“To gauge the understanding and insight that metaphysics provides is to ask whether, in the final analysis, it helps us to cope with our world and harmonize our existence with nature, humanity, and ourselves, and leads to greater freedom and self-realization. Metaphysics is only the beginning. The end is human progress.”

“Being satisfied to drink the dregs from the cup of human progress will not demonstrate our fitness as a people to exist alongside of others, but when of our own initiative we strike out to build industries, governments, and ultimately empires, then and only then will we as a race prove to our creator and to man in general that we are fit to survive and capable of shaping our own destiny.”

People Men Humans Government Race Destiny Progress Industry Fit Drink Prove Capable Creator Strikes Satisfied Cups Empires Initiative Human Progress Dregs

Book:Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

Source: Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

“The power to question is the basis of all human progress.”

Humans Leadership Progress Inspirational Life Bases Questioning Human Progress

Book:Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi: The years of endeavour, August 1969-August 1972

Source: Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi: The years of endeavour, August 1969-August 1972

“If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.”

Ifs Humans Use Science Social Growth Growing Progress Tree Logic Foundation Invention Engines Steam Adjusting Human Thought Steam Engines Growing Things

Book:Lo!

Source: Lo!

“England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”

“All human progress is preceded by new questions”

Humans Progress Human Progress

Book:Awaken The Giant Within

Source: Awaken The Giant Within

“To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.”

“I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.”

“The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.”

Humans Matter Progress Shock March Initials Human Progress

Author:Barbara Kingsolver

“[The church] is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.”

Source: Why I Am Not a Christian

“One who believes, as I do, that the free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, as much as to the Church of Rome.”

Believe Humans Church Progress Intellect Chiefs Rome Engines Human Progress Bolshevism

Book:Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919-22

Source: Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919-22

“A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.”

Humans Kind States Culture Social Moral Progress Conditions Population Improvement All Kinds Scope Social Progress Stationary

Author:John Stuart Mill

“Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle.”

“By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith. And this faith turned out to be faith in man, in the power of human progress. And man became his god.”

Men Way Inspirational Humans Wells Art Soul Lasts Found Literature Dark Progress Complexes Bottom Human Soul Filth Human Progress Chekhov

Author:Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Religion and science are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.”

Men Should Trying Humans Two Soul Hands Fall Progress Wings Height Materialism Superstitions Soar Science And Religion Human Soul Slough Quagmire

Author:Abdu'l-Bahá

“Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a mastery, a control, of the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world. If one estimates human evolution from the point of view of knowledge of the external world, then we are in many respects progressing. If our estimate is from the point of view of the internal world, and of oneness of internal and external, then the judgment must be very different.”

Ifs World Humans Has Beens Different Views Progress Evolution Judgment Point Of View Oneness Our Time Internals Mastery Distinguished Forgetfulness Human Evolution

Author:R. D. Laing

“One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.”

Humans Language Grows Walks Creative Growing Up Progress Products Manifestation Human Thought Idiom Stationary

Author:Wilhelm von Humboldt

“Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.”

Believe Humans Reality Light Seems Government Age Pay Study Progress Middle Students Ought South Bombs Cheer South Africa Senators Middle Ages Examination Hydrogen Human Progress Hydrogen Bomb

Book:Lucky Jim

Source: Lucky Jim

“There will always be those who want to make paintings of the human form with all its parts all where they should be, in spite of progress.”

Want Should Humans Form Humanity Progress Painting Spite Human Form

Author:Philip Pearlstein

“The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions.”

“Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths”

Men Humans Levels Liberty Progress Dignity Evident Desirable High Level Human Progress

Book:Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

Source: Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.”

Humans Stills Important Facts Use Human Beings Situation Progress Possibility Habit Method Acquire Continuing

Book:Democracy and Education: Top American Authors

Source: Democracy and Education: Top American Authors

“The answers to our problems don't lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure.”

“The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both.”

Source: My Study Windows

“He who wholly renounces himself, and relies not on mere human reason, will make good progress in the Scriptures; but the world comprehends them not, from ignorance of that mortification which is the gift of God's word.”

World Humans Reason Progress Ignorance Mere Scripture Rely Gift From God Renounce Mortification Human Reason

Book:The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt

Source: The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt

“The main object of the work was to present such a survey of the advances already made in physical knowledge, and of the mode in which they have been made, as might serve as a real and firm basis for our speculations concerning the progress of human knowledge, and the processes by which sciences are formed.”

Humans Has Beens Made Real Might Process Progress Objects Bases Firm Speculation Surveys Human Knowledge

Book:History of the Inductive Sciences: I. The Greek school philosophy, with reference to physical science. II. The physical sciences in ancient Greece. III. Greek astronomy. IV. Physical science in the middle ages. V. Formal astronomy after the stationary period

Source: History of the Inductive Sciences: I. The Greek school philosophy, with reference to physical science. II. The physical sciences in ancient Greece. III. Greek astronomy. IV. Physical science in the middle ages. V. Formal astronomy after the stationary period

“We [The United States] believe the Iranian people want a future of freedom and human rights: the right to vote, to run for office, to express their views without fear and to pursue political causes. We would welcome the progress, prosperity and freedom of the Iranian people.”

People Want Believe Humans States Running Political Causes United Views United States Rights Progress Office Vote Human Rights Prosperity Pursue Welcome Iranian Right To Vote

Author:Condoleezza Rice

“The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.”

“In that the wisdom of the few becomes available to the many, there is progress in human affairs; without it, the static routine of tradition continues.”

Humans Progress Tradition Affair Available Routine Static

Author:Joseph Jastrow

“Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature.”

Humans Death Consciousness Progress Childhood Stage Youth Manhood Everlasting Human Progress

Author:Edmund Sears

“Liberalism is fundamentally an ideology of liberation that has throughout history risen in protest against the totalitarian and anti-human movements of various kinds, such as communism and nazism. It is therefore natural that the Progress Party with its liberal base once again stands first in the line and takes up the fight when a new fascist ideology as Islamism is spreading throughout the world.”

World Firsts Humans Kind Fighting Natural Lines Party Progress Movement Various Ideology Communism Liberation Liberalism Protest Risen Fascists Nazism

Author:Carl I. Hagen

“Generally speaking, an Indian university must regard itself as one of the living organs of national reconstruction. It must discover the best means of blending together both the spiritual and the material aspects of life. It must equip its alumni irrespective of caste, creed or sex, with individual fitness, not for its own sake, not for merely adorning varied occupations and professions, but in order to teach them how to merge their individuality in the common cause of advancing the progress and prosperity of their motherland and upholding the highest traditions of human civilisation.”

“It has been a long road from Plato's Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines.”

“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.”

Men Humans Seems Passion Loses Steps Progress Movement Wander Folly Wilderness March Inches Trails Pathways Mazes Human Progress Devious

Author:Joseph Alexander Leighton

“Darwinism undermined traditional morality and the value of human life. Then, evolutionary progress became the new moral imperative. This aided the advance of eugenics, which was overtly founded on Darwinian principles. Some eugenicists began advocating euthanasia and infanticide for the disabled. On a parallel track, some prominent Darwinists argued that human racial competition and war is part of the Darwinian struggle for existence. Hitler imbibed these social Darwinist ideas, blended in virulent anti-Semitism, and--there you have it: Holocaust”

“Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.”

Humans Moral Progress Protest Customs

Book:Authority and the Individual

Source: Authority and the Individual

“The triumph of the Confederacy... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.”

World Giving Humans War Would Be Courses Evil Enemy History Progress Victory Affair Triumph Civil War Civilized Destined American Civil War Turning Points Damp Enemy Of Progress

Author:John Stuart Mill

“The phrase 'contrary to all expectations' rings through the story of the progress of human knowledge. It was 'contrary to all expectations' that the Earth was found to revolve around the sun, and not the other way round, and that a mould growing in one of Dr. Alexander Fleming's dishes was found to be capable of destroying bacteria. When in 1989 the spacecraft Voyager 2 got close enough to the planet Naptune to take detailed pictures of the surface, they were 'contrary to all expectations'.”