"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
— Frank Zappa

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Girls you've gotta know when it's time to turn the page."
— Tori Amos (Tori Amos: From the Choirgirl Hotel)

"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
— Henry Ford

"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."
— George Bernard Shaw (Mrs. Warren's Profession)

"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

"Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.
If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"The farther you go, however, the harder it is to return. The world has many edges, and it's easy to fall off."
— Anderson Cooper

"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."
— Alasdair Gray

"There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence."
— Nikola Tesla

"Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing."
— George Orwell

"To reach a port we must set sail –
Sail, not tie at anchor
Sail, not drift."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American..."
— W.E.B. DuBois (Souls of Black Folk & Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt 1933-1945 & Movements of the New Left 1950-1975)

"The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure: If it didn't work last year, do it AGAIN this year (and if possible do it MORE)"
— Daniel Quinn (Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure)

"It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"[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."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread – these are two lows of nature. If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! I am utterly convinced of this."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"A liberal knows that the only certainty in this life is change but believes that the change can be directed toward a constructive end."
— Henry A. Wallace

"Progress always involves risk; you can't steal second base and keep your foot on first."
— F.W. Dupee

"It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies."
— Theodor W. Adorno

"Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,' he told the audience, '. . . 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."
— Susan Quinn (Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times)

"We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"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."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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."
— Jack London (To Build a Fire and Other Stories)

"“An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. Neither the Channel nor the Rhine will arrest its progress. It will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.”


"
— Thomas Paine

"Ideas and not battles mark the forward progress of mankind."
— L. Ron Hubbard

"We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. "
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Discontent is the first necessity of progress. "
— Thomas E. Edison

"The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence."
— George Gordon Byron

"But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world – wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.

We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.



"
— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God."
— Eagles

"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."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"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. "
— H.G. Wells (The Time Machine)

"An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns."
— Terry Eagleton (Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate)

"Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it."
— Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)

"I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric."
— Bartolomeo Vanzetti

"We may be truly said to worship God, though we lack perfection; but we cannot be said to worship Him if we lack sincerity."
— Stephen Charnock

"When I was a kid, I thought I had my life figured out. I knew where I was going. I was sure of whom I was and what I was. I was wrong. See, life is a journey of twist and turns that mold who we are; however, it is not the twist and turns which mold us, but rather, how we take and handle the twist and turns thrown at us. It was not until life threw me flat on my face that I truly discovered who I am and what I am. I am a perpetual work-in-progress. And you know what? I am quite all right with that."
— Cristina Marrero

"Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions."
— Norbert Wiener

"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."
— Tom Robbins (Villa Incognito)

"A humanity that stopped wondering about itself would cease to be free."
— Dominique Janicaud (On the Human Condition)

"But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world – wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.

We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.



"
— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.