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Progress

1. It is not only by the questions we have answered that progress will be measured, but also by those we are still asking.

Freda Adler (b. 1934) U.S. writer, educator, criminologist. Sisters in Crime (1975)

 

2. Like the agricultural age of the past and our industrial age of the present, an emerging information age is now filled with questions calling for leadership in development.

K.Y. Amoako, Ghanaian economist and executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Speech, Africa Development Forum, Addids Ababa, Ethiopia (October 25, 1999)

 

3. Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain…few people are aware of the enormity of this shift and fewer of them are lawyers or pubic officials.

John Perry Barlow (b. 1947) U.S. academic, lyricists, and writer. Former song writer for the Grateful Dead, Barlow was the first to use William Gibson’s science-fiction term “cyberspace” to describe the global electronic social space. “The Economy of Ideas,” Wired (March 1994)

 

4. It’s the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you’re mad, then dangerous, then there’s a pause and you can’t find anyone who disagrees with you.

Tony Benn (b. 1925) British politician. Quoted in Observer (London) (October 6, 1991)

 

5. Men will not be content to manufacture life; they will want to improve on it.

J.D. Bernal (1901-71) Irish physicist. The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929)

 

6. We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is!

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)  Argentinian writer. Borges et Borges (1969)

 

7. All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) British writer. “Life,” Notebooks (H. Festing-Jones, ed; 1912)

 

8. As enunciated today “progress” is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) British novelist, poet, and critic. Heretics (1905)

 

9. pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease.

E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) U.S. poet and painter. 1*1 (1944), no. 14

 

10. What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) British psychologist. Attrib.

 

11. Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) U.S. essayist, lecturer, and poet. “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series (1841)

 

12. That is the trouble with prosperity –it hides the defects of a business.

Harvey Firestone (1868-1938) U.S. founder of Firestone Tire and Rubber. Men and Rubber (cowritten with Samuel Crowther; 1926)

 

13. Growth is like creativity, it doesn’t go along very neat, precise plans. You get clogged highways before you figure out a way to open up capacity. You get pollution before you figure out a way to fight it.

Steve Forbes (b. 1947) U.S. publishing executive interview, Reason Magazine (May 1991)

 

14. When you give people new tools, breakthrough communication tools, it has a transformational effect. The last time anything this dramatic happened you’d have to go back to the beginning of the Industrial Age.

Bill Gates (b. 1955) U.S. entrepreneur, chairman and C.E.O. of Microsoft. Speech, Government Leaders Conference, Seattle, Washington (April 4, 2000)

 

15. The world is not changing because computer operators have replaced clerk-typists, but because the human struggle to survive and prosper now depends on an entirely new source of wealth. It is information, Knowledge applied to work to create value.

Bill Gates (b. 1955) U.S. entrepreneur, chairman and C.E.O. of Microsoft. Speech, Manhattan Institute, New York City (December 2, 1988)

 

16. The growing technical prowess of nations such as India unnerves some people…who fear a loss of jobs and opportunities. I think these fears are misplaced. Economics is not a zero-sum game.

Bill Gates (b. 1955) U.S. entrepreneur, chairman and C.E.O. of Microsoft. New York Times Syndicate (April 8, 1997)

 

17. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

Henry George (1839-97) U.S. economist. Progress and Poverty (1879)

 

18. “Progress” involves the systematic substitution of the technosphere or manmade world for the biosphere or natural world.

Edward Goldsmith (b. 1928) British ecologist. “Biospheric Ethics,” The Future of Progress (Helena Norberg-Hodge, Peter Goering, and Steven Gorelick, eds.; 1992)

 

19. The revolution that has destroyed the traditional corporation began with efforts to improve it.

Michael Hammer (b. 1948) U.S. author and academic. Beyond Re-engineering (1966)

 

20. We were not destined to be empty raincoats, nameless numbers on a payroll…If that is to be its price, economic progress is an empty promise.

Charles Handy (b. 1932) British business executive and author. Quoted in Business week (April 4, 1994)

 

21. If economic progress means that we become anonymous cogs in some great machine, then progress is an empty promise.

Charles Handy (b. 1932) British business executive and author. The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future (1994)

 

22. One of the remarkable features of the communications revolution is the way in which the tools of that revolution…have empowered small business and dismantled many of the market barriers and the costs involved in world-wide information seeking.

John Winston Howard (b. 1939) Australian prime minister. Speech, Tokyo, Japan (September 19, 1996)

 

23. You have to invest in thinking through the architecture of things.

Steve Jobs (b. 1955) U.S. entrepreneur, cofounder and C.E.O. of Apple Computer Company, and C.E.O. of Pixar. Quoted in “Steve’s Two Jobs,” Time (Michael Krantz; October 18, 1999)

 

24. To go fast, row slowly.

Brendan Kennelly (b. 1936) Irish poet and academic. The Power of Positive Thinking (1972)

 

25. Changes are not without cost. It produces reactionaries that fight to block progress. We have found it possible to minimize resistance by establishing a culture based on core values.

Charles G. Koch (b. 1935) U.S. management theorist, author, chairman and C.E.O. of Koch Industries. Speech, Kansas State University (March 4, 1996)

 

26. Progress is mostly the product of rogues.

Tom Peters (b. 1942) U.S. management consultant and author. Liberation Management (1992)

 

27. I think economics is about passion. Economic progress, whether it is a two-person coffee shop or whether it is Netscape, is about people with brave ideas. Because it is brave to mortgage the house when you’ve got two kids to start a coffee shop.

Tom Peters (b. 1942) U.S. management consultant and author. Interview, Reason Magazine (October 1997)

 

28. How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis-a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamics-a world of consultant creation, discovery, and competition?

Virginia Postrel (b. 1960) U.S. editor and author. The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (1998)

 

29. Tap the energy of the anarchist and he will be the one to push your company ahead.

Anita Roddick (b. 1942) British entrepreneur and founder of The Body Shop (cowritten with Russell Miller; 1991)

 

30. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) U.S. president. Second presidential inaugural address (January 20, 1937)

 

31. Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) British philosopher and writer. “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish,” Unpopular Essays (1950)

 

 

32. Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on rententiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana (1863-1952) U.S. Philosopher, novelist, and poet. The Life of Reason (1905)

 

33. 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 (1856-1950) Irish writer and critic. “Reason,” Maxims for Revolutionists (1905)

 

34. The tendency of mechanical and scientific invention is not so much to diminish employment as to change its character.

HerbertSidebotham (1872-1940) British journalist and author. “Like Madam’s Hat,” The Sense of Things (1938)

 

35. An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

Iain Sinclair (b. 1943) British author. “Riverside Opportunities,” Downriver (1991)

 

36. It depends entirely upon the image of you that people have in their minds whether you will climb the ladder slowly, painfully, or with a rapidity that will surprise-and appal-your friends.

Gerald Sparrow (1903-88) British business executive and writer. How to Become a Millionaire (1960), ch. 2

 

37. Progress, therefore, is not an accident but a necessity…a part of nature.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) British social theorist. Social Statics (1851), pt. 1, ch. 2