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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:

Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still;
And when the stars are labouring, we believe
It is not that they govern, but they grieve
For stubborn ignorance; all things that are
Made for our general uses, are at war, —
Even we among ourselves; and from the strife,
Your first unlike opinions got a life.

John Fletcher The Honest Man's Fortune (1613)

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.

Karl Popper Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)

Waiting for power to move to its inevitable collapse is suicidal for all concerned. Blacks and other Third World peoples have the very imminent prospect of genocidal tactics to contend with, and we can now all see that the modern industrial state, motivated by exclusive groups of capitalist masters, cannot regulate itself to make possible an inclusive production and distribution of goods, or production without a massive waste of resources and destruction of all that stands about. The debate ends, the action begins. It is not question of the necessity of violence, but of how to organize it.

George Jackson Blood in My Eye (1971)

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