1f8a94e
|
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
|
|
gains
understanding
progress
illusion
future
science
hope
inspirational
knowledge
|
Sigmund Freud |
cb54163
|
Push your boundaries beyond the ordinary; be that "extra" in "extraordinary.
|
|
progress
inspiration
inspirational-attitude
inspirational-life
inspirational-quotes
inspire
life-and-living
life-quotes
living
optimistic
positive-affirmation
positive-life
inspiring
positive
positive-thinking
life-lessons
optimism
life
inspirational
growth
|
Roy T. Bennett |
19df86f
|
We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.
|
|
progress
|
H.G. Wells |
3d30d0c
|
And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.
|
|
progress
responsibility
erring
mistakes
|
Kurt Vonnegut |
dc5c4be
|
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
|
|
progress
free-speech
|
George Bernard Shaw |
8e004f3
|
Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.
|
|
progress
happiness
fulfillment
movement
innovation
growth
|
Ayn Rand |
433dc10
|
There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.
|
|
progress
confrontation
|
Christopher Hitchens |
0c686f9
|
"We've forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We've ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore. ("The Thing")"
|
|
progress
aspiration
|
Richard Matheson |
4f78717
|
These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.
|
|
progress
progressivism
simplicity
|
Laura Ingalls Wilder |
cf46c1a
|
Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let's be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.
|
|
progress
tradition
|
Laura Ingalls Wilder |
b13b73b
|
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
|
|
progress
philosophical
philosophy
dressing
innovation
melancholy
thinking
thought
introspection
|
Ray Bradbury |
e103052
|
[Flaubert] didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
|
|
progress
science
technology
|
Julian Barnes |
e194757
|
A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.
|
|
progress
golding-bright
ice-skating
|
George Bernard Shaw |
05dbe97
|
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous.
|
|
progress
war
moving-forward
|
Steven Pressfield |
0edc3e5
|
Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
|
|
progress
|
G.K. Chesterton |
1089517
|
The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure:
|
|
progress
culture
failure
|
Daniel Quinn |
5fba770
|
"Then the Dean repeated the mantra that has had such a marked effect on the progress of knowledge throughout the ages. "Why don't we just mix up absolutely everything and see what happens?" he said. And Ridcully responded with the traditional response. "It's got to be worth a try," he said."
|
|
progress
|
Terry Pratchett |
39af01e
|
The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.
|
|
progress
history
|
Ludwig Wittgenstein |
bb31758
|
An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.
|
|
progress
|
Neal Stephenson |
530847a
|
After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection--not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.
|
|
progress
religion
science
caves
business
|
Tom Robbins |
a8cb7e8
|
[Man] progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.
|
|
progress
|
George Bernard Shaw |
cca4c04
|
We're better off. But I don't know if the world's better off. I don't know if the two are the same thing.
|
|
progress
world
improvement
|
Rachel Cohn |
fe1b286
|
Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that discovered his three laws--discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that , , , and , almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of , , and , of , and and of all the pioneers of progress--that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that and , , and , and , and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?
|
|
discoveries
progress
tragedy
libraries
poets
shakespeare
india
light
writer
fiction
books
inspiration
bible
science
songs
intelligence
alessandro-volta
benjamin-franklin
beranger
bonaventura-cavalieri
bonaventura-francesco-cavalieri
burns
cavalieri
chemistry
china
copernicus
descartes
euclid
experiments
franklin
fulton
galileo
galileo-galilei
galvani
gottfried-leibniz
gottfried-von-leibniz
gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz
gottfried-wilhelm-von-leibniz
greece
hydrostatics
inventions
isaac-newton
james-watt
johann-von-goethe
johannes-kepler
kepler
laws-of-motion
leibniz
luigi-aloisio-galvani
luigi-galvani
math
mathematics
morse
newton
nicolaus-copernicus
optics
pentateuch
pierre-jean-de-béranger
pioneers
pneumatics
rene-descartes
richard-trevithick
robert-burns
robert-fulton
rome
samuel-finley-breese-morse
samuel-morse
schiller
the-bible
theory-of-gravity
theory-of-universal-gravitation
trevethick
volta
watt
Æschylus
johann-wolfgang-von-goethe
goethe
egypt
william-shakespeare
|
Robert G. Ingersoll |
ce0b557
|
Walking was not fast enough so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew. Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can go only as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.
|
|
progress
people
speed
souls
humans
|
Margaret Atwood |
9b5d182
|
The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.
|
|
progress
discworl
|
Terry Pratchett |
0d2ece0
|
Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
|
|
enlightenment
progress
irony
lies
socialism
literature
humanism
politics
faith
religion
science
truth
apoliticism
berlin
bought-priesthood
cape-coloureds
eurocentricism
george-hw-bush
german-people
groupthink
left-wing-politics
margaret-thatcher
munich
personality-politics
polytheism
potus
radical-politics
tribalism
xhosa-people
zulu-people
ronald-reagan
sectarianism
monotheism
solipsism
argument
critical-thinking
self-pity
self-love
south-africa
totalitarianism
journalism
right-wing-politics
george-orwell
soviet-union
united-states
conviction
orthodoxy
los-angeles
film
individualism
atheism
hedonism
thomas-mann
populism
russia
communism
postmodernism
cold-war
germany
literary-criticism
euphemism
|
Christopher Hitchens |
896ae3b
|
"It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called-- were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies. You may ridicule me--I am quite willing that you should-- I am a fit subject, no doubt. But I think if you knew what I have gone through these last few years you would rather pity me. And if they knew"--he nodded towards the college at which the dons were severally arriving--"it is just possible they would do the same."
|
|
progress
generations
|
Thomas Hardy |
8d10f8b
|
I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.
|
|
progress
|
G.K. Chesterton |
aebbcc4
|
Jerusalem was capital of southern Israel, known then as Judah. Isn't it true that there's always a rivalry between north and south? North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Northern and Southern Ireland, Yankees and Rebels, uptown and downtown. Somebody please tell me why that is? Maybe southerners get too much sun, like Mr. Sock over there, frying his threads, and northerners don't get enough (although I hardly think northern Israel a cool spot in the shade), but southern peoples--tropical and downtown types--always seem to lean toward decadence, whereas uptown, in the north, progress is favored. Decadence and progress obviously are at odds.
|
|
progress
north-vs-south
rivalry
northerners
southerners
jerusalem
|
Tom Robbins |
48b2698
|
[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.
|
|
progress
invention
|
Bill Bryson |
2430302
|
"My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word "progress." At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress, I was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies to the only important question-"Where are we to steer?"-by saying, "We are being carried somewhere."
|
|
progress
sailing
|
Leo Tolstoy |
36c13fd
|
Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded. Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,--this is the very struggle of progress.
|
|
progress
|
Victor Hugo |
ad6ba8e
|
Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.
|
|
progress
television
culture
utopia
ideology
technology
|
Neil Postman |
0f3375e
|
She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it.
|
|
progress
utility
purpose
technology
|
Ayn Rand |
135d12e
|
I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done.
|
|
progress
immortality
death
longevity
decadence
|
Isaac Asimov |
834c48c
|
Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a Colossus shall we be when the Southern continent comes up to our mark! What a stand will it secure as a ralliance for the reason & freedom of the globe! I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night. I will dream on, always fancying that Mrs Adams and yourself are by my side marking the progress and the obliquities of ages and countries.
|
|
progress
history
future
dreams
inspirational
ignorance
|
Thomas Jefferson |
04ee4c5
|
Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.
|
|
progress
chronologies
histories
|
Alberto Manguel |
03efd4e
|
It is good to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.
|
|
progress
teamwork
|
H.G. Wells |
4e5c9a5
|
So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.
|
|
progress
work
laziness
wise
|
Jack London |
1342eec
|
Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert's novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. It accompanies poor Emma throughout her days, to her bed of love and to her deathbed, over which two deadly agelastes, Homais and Bournisien, go on endlessly trading their inanities like a kind of funeral oration. But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert's vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!
|
|
progress
stupidity
education
spectrum
flaubert
essay
knowledge
modernity
|
Milan Kundera |
0b46296
|
"The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought 'dogmatic,' for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic."
|
|
progress
truth
rationalism
doctrine
dogma
|
G.K. Chesterton |
a97d810
|
But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.
|
|
progress
dreams
hope
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
a89b506
|
O what we ben! And what we come to!
|
|
progress
human-condition
|
Russell Hoban |
8293e3b
|
Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier.
|
|
progress
morality
relativism
|
G.K. Chesterton |
cef7f0e
|
I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.
|
|
progress
tribalism
grandparents
convention
culture
|
Wallace Stegner |
3054e59
|
"What is the American fetish about highways? They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers. Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.
|
|
progress
highways
|
Ishmael Reed |
f098d0c
|
What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together
|
|
progress
stupidity
science
|
Julian Barnes |
72cbe82
|
"Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like "forward" and "farther" are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it. (If fascination with the word "forward" has become universal, isn't it mainly because death is already speaking to us from nearby?)"
|
|
progress
farther
near-end
forward
|
Milan Kundera |
5a65531
|
"The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men's House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility ... The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; they younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream--the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance."
|
|
progress
illusion
business
disillusionment
race
|
Ralph Ellison |
4915637
|
Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.
|
|
progress
revolution
|
Stephen Jay Gould |
ee7460b
|
"It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! ("Jane Brown's Body")"
|
|
progress
science
medicine
|
Cornell Woolrich |
48963a2
|
If Enlightenment in a technical sense is the programmatic word for progress in the awareness of explicitness, one can say without fear of grand formulas that rendering the implicit explicit is the cognitive form of fate. Were this not the case, one would never have had cause to believe that later knowledge would necessarily be better knowledge - for, as we know, everything that has been termed 'research' in the last centuries has rested on this assumption. Only when the inward-folded 'things' or facts are by their nature subject to a tendency to unfold themselves and become more comprehensible for us can one - provided the unfolding succeeds - speak of a true increase in knowledge. Only if the 'matters' are spontaneously prepared (or can be forced by imposed examination) to come to light in magnified and better-illuminated areas can one seriously - which here means with ontological emphasis - state that there is science in progress, there are real knowledge gains, there are expeditions in which we, the epistemically committed collective, advance to hidden continents of knowledge by making thematic what was previously unthematic, bringing to light what is yet unknown, and transforming vague cognizance into definite knowledge. In this manner we increase the cognitive capital of our society - the latter word without quotation marks in this case.
|
|
progress
science
knowledge
|
Peter Sloterdijk |
572fe5b
|
At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiguity. At the fractal stage there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is now no law of value, merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of general metastasis of value, a haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value. Indeed, we should really no longer speak of 'value' at all, for this kind of propagation or chain reaction makes all valuation possible.
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progress
science
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Jean Baudrillard |
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Progress and success are always relative. When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fish-like, for it had no enemies and no competitors. But if a fish were to take to the land today, it would be gobbled up by a passing fox as surely as a Mongol horde would be wiped out by machine guns. In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things.
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progress
reality
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Matt Ridley |
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As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.
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progress
heaven
idealism
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G.K. Chesterton |
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Don't let the bastards get you down. Stay true to yourself and your values. Most of all, keep going.
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progress
true-self
values
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Hillary Rodham Clinton |
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There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.
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progress
optimism
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Geoff Dyer |
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So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.
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progress
elements
german
germans
ugly
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Kate Atkinson |
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There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before.
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alexander-mccall-smith
progress
life
tyrants
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Alexander McCall Smith |
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I suppose none of what I'm saying matters. In a few years a search like this won't even be necessary. We have instruments now that can be mounted on the underside of an airplane. To find a man all you have to do is fly over the spot where you think he is, and the machine will register his body heat. Right now there aren't enough of those machines to go around. Most of them are in the war. But when we come home from there, well, a man on the run won't have hope. And a man like me, he won't be needed. This is the last of something. It's too bad. As much as I hate war, I fear the day when machines take the place of men. At least now a man can still get along on his talents.
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progress
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David Morrell |
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(...)entre todas las razas del mundo, nuestra sed, o mejor dicho, nuestra avidez, de tesoros, de oro, de especias y de dominio, !oh, si!, sobre todo del dulce dominio, !es la mas aguda, la mas insaciable, la mas carente de todo escrupulo! Es esta avidez la que alimenta nuestro progreso, no se si con fines diabolicos o divinos. Ni usted tampoco lo sabe, senor. Ni yo tengo el menor interes en saberlo. Simplemente, me alegro de que el Creador me arrojase del lado de los vencedores.
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progress
spanish
diabólico
progreso
vencer
divino
winner
español
divine
win
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David Mitchell |
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We need to make progress. Otherwise we're waiting for news in a world where there is no longer any news.
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progress
future
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Ray Bradbury |
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Se ciascuno pensa solo a se stesso e non si fida che di se stesso, come volete che ci sia coraggio civile, dal momento che questa virtu si basa sulla rinuncia a se stessi? Coraggio civile e coraggio militare nascono dallo stesso principio. Voi siete chiamati a dare la vostra vita in un sol momento, la nostra si consuma a goccia a goccia. Da entrambe le parti e la stessa lotta, sotto forme diverse. Non basta essere onesti per far progredire il piu piccolo paese, bisogna anche essere preparati; senza contare che istruzione, onesta, amor di patria non valgono niente se non c'e la ferma volonta di trascurare ogni interesse personale per dedicarsi al pubblico bene
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progress
wisdom
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Honoré de Balzac |
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It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awake that slumbering Progress.
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progress
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Victor Hugo |
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It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.
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progress
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Victor Hugo |
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"It's suicide," Doc Holland said, shaking his head. "Fools, all of them. This isn't any conventional war- this is madness." The general let out a weary breath. "No, Doctor-this is fear . . . and fear makes fools of us all."
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progress
learning-from-mistakes
inclusion
working-together
warfare
fear-quotes
supernatural
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L.A. Banks |
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"Those whose eyes twenty-five and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some--such as Josie, Jim, and Ben--to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers,--barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim."
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progress
hope
obstacles
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Progress is inevitable. And it's a force for good.
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progress
inevitable
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Blake Crouch |
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We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.
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progress
literature
death-of-literature
stagnant
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Thomas C. Foster |
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We know from Glenn Milne's inundation data that Gozo and Malta were indeed one big island during the Ice Age, down to approximately 13,500 years ago, and that they did not take on their present form as an archipelago of three islands (with little Comino in between) until around 11,000 years ago. Accordingly, if the medieval tradition of Malta and Gozo as one big island is not a complete invention -- and why should it be? -- then, 'fantastic' though it may seem, it somehow preserves a memory of Malta as it appeared more than 11,000 years ago. It is well known that most medieval mapmakers were only copyists reproducing older maps and [...] I believe we cannot exclude the possibility that the single large island called Gaulometin of Galonia leta that has somehow survived on certain medieval maps may indeed be a representation of Malta in a much earlier time. A mental leap is required in order even to consider such a possibility. It is necessary to set aside all preconceptions about the past, and all unexamined notions of how societies evolve. Above all, we have to rid ourselves of the ingrained conviction that (despite some setbacks) the basic story of human civilization has been steadily and reassuringly onwards and upwards from the very beginning. It may not have been so. There may be tremendous gaps, of which we are blissfully unaware, in the evidence presently available to us concerning the origins and progress of civilization. In particular, there has been no sustained or serious search for very ancient underwater ruins along the millions of square kilometres of continental shelves flooded at the end of the Ice Age. So it is , and within the bounds of reason, that a civilization of some sort might have flourished during the closing millennia of the Ice Age and might not yet have been detected by archaeologists. A civilization not necessarily at all like our own but still advanced enough to have mastered complex skills such as seafaring and navigation (that do not call for a large material or industrial base) and to have left behind memories of the world as it looked before the flood and at various stages during the rising of the seas. The sort of civilization, perhaps, that would have built with megaliths and aligned them with navigational precision to the path of the sun. Maybe even a civilization that measured the earth, mapped it and netted it with a latitude and longitude grid. Until such a lost civilization has been entirely ruled out -- and we are far from that -- it is rational to keep our minds open to the possibility, however extraordinary it may seem, that certain ancient maps have indeed carried down to us broken images of the antediluvian world.
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progress
ice-age
underwater-ruins
deluges
ice-age-civilizations
heritage
lost-civilizations
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Graham Hancock |
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"There's the claim that the only progress made is in posing problems that scientists can answer. That philosophy never has the means to answer problems--it's just biding its time till the scientists arrive on the scene. You hear this quite often. There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. But there's a lot of philosophical progress, it's just a progress that's very hard to see. It's very hard to see because we see
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prejudice
progress
human-rights
science
philosophy
animal-rights
bigotry
thinking
thought
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein |
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She said his life would be like walking upstream in a rushing river. The secret was to take small steps and just keep moving forward. If he tried to take too big a step, the current would knock him off his feet and carry him back downstream.
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progress
small-steps
moving-forward
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Louis Sachar |
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Some of the conclusions that I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views had been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands.
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progress
moral-philosophy
reform
ethics
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Peter Singer |
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In the decades following the Revolution, America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change, but came to expected and prize it.
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progress
novelty
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Gordon S. Wood |
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Neither my readers nor I are in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory, but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and *reimagined* if it is to survive.
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progress
politics
optimism
outlook
white-teeth
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Zadie Smith |
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In his mind progress was always to be measured in inches, especially when you didn't have yards or even feet of success to show off.
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progress
success
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David Baldacci |
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It's not like the Middle Ages, when you had the Church and the aristocracy keeping everything nice and stagnant.
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progress
religion
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Kevin Hearne |
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Was that love? If so, he couldn't fathom why poets waxed on about it being such a blissful state. As far as he could tell, it was about as blissful as riding an unbroke horse, a bone-rattling endeavor where one held on for dear life, unable to recognize if he was making progress until either the horse quit buckin' or the ground smacked him in the face.
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progress
love
horse
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Karen Witemeyer |
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Live for the future. A cosmic history read out of signs so subtle and mathematical that only the effort of a huge transtemporal group of powerful minds could ever have teased it out; but then those who came later could be given the whole story, with its unexplored edges there to take off into.
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progress
science
human-story
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Kim Stanley Robinson |