1,930 Quotes About Progress

When our ancestors picked up weapons in the jungle, it was necessity - when their children picked up weapons, it was tradition - but when we pick up weapons, it is stupidity.

While many things have changed, some things haven’t changed enough.

Instead of waiting for the right moment, BE the right moment. You won't be ready for anything if you aren't ready to be you.

Water has the potential to grow life even in the barren desert, and it also has the potential to flood an entire city destroying countless lives - fire has the potential to give heat in the freezing winter, and it also has the potential to burn an entire forest to ashes. Potential is neither good nor evil, it's our intention that makes the distinction.

...nature itself is a poem that we humans have written [...and] the imagination is the principle vehicle of human progress.

Civilization is the process of substituting liberty for power.

When the individual consciousness and social consciousness become one, the slightest trace of human act can trigger a tsunami of change in the world. When the illusory separation between the self and the society is demolished by the ambition-less will of the self, all that there remains is peace, piety and progress.

Act with conscience and all will be well for humanity. And even when it's not well, we'll have each other to share our burdens. In the end, isn't it all that matters, that we are not alone in the vastness of the universe, that we have each other to hold, each day, every day, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death make us dust!

Going further back, have the seventy or so turbulent millennia since the Cognitive Revolution made the world a better place to live? Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry?