Progress - Quotes and Proverbs

Let’s move forward, because things have improved and can still get better. Here are some proverbs and quotes about progress.

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All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.

Samuel Johnson

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

Bureaucracy by its nature resists change and nullifies progress.

James Cook

But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.

Steven Pinker
Source: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

Dare mighty things.

Theodore Roosevelt

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Oscar Wilde

Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.

John Clapham

Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.

David Deutsch

For all their foolishness, modern societies have been getting smarter, and all things being equal, a smarter world is a less violent world.

Steven Pinker

Goals help you channel your energy into action.

Les Brown

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

Mahatma Gandhi

Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics.

Tony Blair

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

Tom Robbins

I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.

Marie Curie

Ideas matter. The world matters. Our lives matter, and the choices we make as we navigate our lives perhaps matter most of all.

Lauren Myracle

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Isaac Newton

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Frederick Douglass

If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be -- you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born, whether you were going to be a man or a woman -- if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born you'd choose now.

Barack Obama

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

George Bernard Shaw

In a gentle way, you can shake the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

In the future today's futurologists will look silly.

(unknown author)

One person can make a difference, and everyone should try.

John F. Kennedy

Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.

Frederick B. Wilcox

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

Robert Kennedy

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

George Bernard Shaw

Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.

Herbert Read

PROGRESS. The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.

H.L. Mencken

Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken without developing new evils requiring new remedies.

William Howard Taft

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Aldous Huxley

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

Albert Einstein

The best road to progress is freedom's road.

John F. Kennedy

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Gaston Bachelard

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

George Bernard Shaw

The future is green energy, sustainability, renewable energy.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

The power to question is the basis of all human progress.

Indira Gandhi

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 little.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The thinkers of the Enlightenment sought a new understanding of the human condition. The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

Steven Pinker
Source: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

Things can be both bad and better.

Hans Rosling

True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice.

Saint Francis of Assisi

We are, I think, in the right road of improvement, for we are making experiments.

Benjamin Franklin

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

Havelock Ellis

Where there's a will, there's a way.

If you really want something to be done, it can be done.

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

Frank Zappa

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

Rabindranath Tagore

You've got to vote, vote, vote, vote. That's it; that's the way we move forward. That's how we make progress for ourselves and for our country.

Michelle Obama

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