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Progress Quotes

Shakespeare leads, with Milton, Browning, Longfellow and the educator Horace Mann close behind. The sourced lines are Emerson’s, from English Traits (1856), that the thing done avails and not what is said about it, and Thoreau’s from Walden (1854), that our inventions are pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things.

“Heaven ne’er helps the men who will not act” is credited to Sophocles and marked misattributed. According to the notes, an anonymous verse was wrongly attached to a Sophocles fragment through a confusion in Stobaeus’s anthology. The line about the human mind progressing in spirals, credited to Madame de Staël, is flagged too.

Random quote on Progress

Most quoted on progress:

When do we reach a point where people become responsible for their own actions?

Jack McDevitt Ancient Shores (1996)

The Yoga of action, leading to union with the soul is fiery aspiration, spiritual reading and devotion to Ishvara.

Patañjali

You pursue progress, even if you suspect that it is an illusion.

Charles Sheffield Aftermath (1998)

Disobedience is the vehicle of progress.

John McAfee

Logic and luck will not meet without action.

Hossein Nuri The Last Festival (2000)

Action expressed in a wrong channel is worse than no action at all.

Johnston McCulley The Mark of Zorro (1919)

Action cannot destroy ignorance, for it is not in conflict with or opposed to ignorance. Knowledge does verily destroy ignorance as light destroys deep darkness.

Adi Shankara Atma Bodha (1987)

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan (1959)

Progress in civilization seems possible only in interludes when history is idling.

John Gray The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

To be static was never wise. Cobwebs clung to walls which stood. Men must journey, for in motion lay the seed, or at least the symbol of progress.

Tanith Lee Night's Sorceries (1987)

There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.

Samuel R. Delany Nova (1968)

The only cure for grief is action.

George Henry Lewes The Spanish Drama (1846)

We can only choose between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative.

Étienne Gilson

For a new type of progress throughout the world to become a reality, everyone must change. Tolerance is the alpha and omega of a new world order.

Mikhail Gorbachev

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams Letter to John Adams (1774)

In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas — and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed.

Werner Heisenberg Physics and Beyond : Encounters and Conversation (1971)

The country needs peace, the country needs reconciliation and development. We will move forward with this peace implementation.

Taban Deng Gai Taban Deng Gai (2016)

Things should be done for their own sake. I accept that I will never understand reality, so I concentrate on action, dharma [duty] and commitment.

Morarji Desai

Give encouragement (the incentive to action) — you will have courage and be encouraged.

W. Clement Stone

It was a hard thing to contemplate, even harder to accept, the inevitable tide of technological progress, which even as it created careers for some, also destroyed careers for others.

K. A. Bedford Paradox Resolution (2012)

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