Progress Quotes - page 97
People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development - the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example - they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
John Kenneth Galbraith
What still needs to be accomplished can be summed up by the lovely album released on my birthday last year by Solange-A Seat at the Table. How much significant, systemic progress and change can be made if you still don't have a seat at the table? Walter Mosley was organizing around this question in the early 90s via PEN's Open Book Committee, which I believe he founded, to help bring more people of color into the publishing industry. Why is that vital? Because different people at the table ask different questions, seek different voices, and have a different relationship to all the things we are told are "universal.” Intersectionality matters. Consider what work we wouldn't get to read if other talented people didn't get a seat at the table, a chance to guest edit, an opportunity to curate, to be a juror, to host, promote, celebrate, read and review, be reviewed, speak ...
Walter Mosley
Let's be knowledgeable and wise, and act on what we truly believe.
Again, we got to look in the mirror, lead with humility, and acknowledge the values that are inherent to but also above politics. We've got to make choices, make stands, embrace new ideas, and preserve the traditions that can create true - true progress for the next generation.
With real leadership, let's start giving us - all of us, with real leadership - let's start giving all of us good reason to believe that the American Dream is not an illusion.
Matthew McConaughey
The Theatre of the Absurd ... can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time.  The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions. The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, nationalism, and various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by the war.
Martin Esslin
The Infinite alone justifies the existence of the finite and the finite by itself has no entirely separate value or independent existence. Life, if it is not an illusion, is a divine Play, a manifestation of the glory of the Infinite. Or it is a means by which the soul growing in Nature through countless forms and many lives can approach, touch, feel and unite itself through love and knowledge and faith and adoration and a Godward will in works with this transcendent Being and this infinite Existence.
This Self or this self-existent Being is the one supreme reality, and all things else are either only appearances or only true by dependence upon it. It follows that self-realisation and God-realisation are the great business of the living and thinking human being. All life and thought are in the end a means of progress towards self-realisation and God-realisation.
Sri Aurobindo
The lice of poor performance in government – poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed – if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality – are very much with us today. With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood'.[.
Olusegun Obasanjo
Of all the miserable, unprofitable, inglorious wars in the world is the war against words. Let men say just what they like. Let them propose to cut every throat and burn every house - if they so like it. We have nothing to do with a man's words or a man's thoughts, except to put against them better words and better thoughts, and so to win in the great moral and intellectual duel that is always going on, and on which all progress depends.
Auberon Herbert
Who dares impede my progress? Who presume
The spirit to control which guideth me?
Still must the arrow wing its destined flight!
Where danger is, there must Johanna be;
Nor now, nor here, am I foredoomed to fall;
Our monarch's royal brow I first must see
Invested with the round of sovereignty.
No hostile power can rob me of my life,
Till I've accomplished the commands of God.
Friedrich Schiller
Today I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the extraordinary progress we've made. In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country. America's- so true. [assembly laughs] I didn't expect that reaction, but that's OK.
Donald Trump
He [Ambedkar] was quite clear that Muslims proposed to hold to their demands for 50:50 and so gradually lay the foundation of Pakistan, and he was perfectly content himself, he said, with that state of things, and in favour of the Pakistan idea quite frankly because it meant the British would have to stay in India. He saw not the least prospect of our overcoming difficulties here by guarantees of any sort and (like most minorities) he has, I suspect, little interest in constitutional progress....
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
Without peace there can be no further progress on earth. The simple truth is this: We have reached the point in human evolution where the only possible future is a peaceful one.
Now, there are many people who argue: "Oh, we're never peaceful and we'll always try to kill each other." The truth is most people don't want to go around murdering each other. Out of six billion people, most are actually very nice peaceful people. Unfortunately we have not been willing to restrain the few rabid dogs that routinely like to attack the flock.
Steven M. Greer
Evolution is a process, of which we are products, and in which we are active agents. There is no finality about the process, and no automatic or unified progress; but much improvement has occurred in the past, and there could be much further improvement in the future (though there is also the possibility of future failure and regression). Thus the central long-term concern of religion must be to promote further evolutionary improvement and to realise new possibilities; and this means greater fulfilment by more human individuals and fuller achievement by more human societies.
Julian Huxley
And above and beyond the mere commercial gain, there rose under Mr. Gladstone's magic wand the vista of an age of security and peace-disbanded armaments, forgotten jealousies, immunity not only from the scourge but from the panic of war; pleasant dreams, constantly belied by experience, constantly renewed by theorists, but too closely linked to the hopes of all who believe either in material progress or in the promises of religion ever to be abandoned as chimera.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
As we walk hand in hand through the pathways of knowledge, remember that I am giving you freely and without stint the full accumulation of my two months' experience as a candidate. I have on file a complete record of everything I've said and done. Ever since I threw my hat in the ring I have had myself shadowed, and the results were very entertaining. The things that go on in those back rooms, you wouldn't believe.
So now we begin our journey together. If you follow these instructions carefully, you will find that every step of your progress, like the path that climbs up and up from the sheltered valley, offers you an ever-wider and more facinating vista, until at last you come out upon the summit of the wrong hill.
Gracie Allen
Let us speak of our madness. We are always being called mad. If we are mad - we and our brothers in America who are walking hand in hand with us in the vanguard of progress - at least we are mad in company with most of our great predecessors and all the most intelligent foreigners. Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth were all mad in turn. We shall be proud to join them in the Asylum to which they are now consigned.
Edith Sitwell
For you the group meditation is essential; it will serve to aid your soul in its life task and to integrate you into the second ray sphere of influence, which will be of real use. My brother, we travel not alone. For you, again, group love, group understanding, group happiness and group work are essential to progress, real happiness and good physical health. In group work and contact comes relief from inner tension, through the sharing of force. You...carry much force. Disperse it among your brothers.
Alice Bailey
We have endeavoured to render the land revenue more equable in its incidence, to lift the load of usury from the shoulders of the peasant, and to check that reckless alienation of the soil which in many parts of the country was fast converting him from a free proprietor to a bond slave. We have done our best to encourage industries which little by little will relieve the congested field of agriculture, develop the indigenous resources of India, and make that country more and more self-providing in the future. I would not indulge in any boast, but I dare to think that as a result of these efforts I can point to an India that is more prosperous, more contented, and more hopeful. Wealth is increasing in India. There is no test you can apply which does not demonstrate it. Trade is growing. Evidences of progress and prosperity are multiplying on every side.6°.
George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
Black's celebrated thesis ...gained for him not merely the degree of Doctor of Medicine, but also brought his name before every "philosopher" in Europe and America as that of a man who had made a discovery of more fundamental influence on the progress of Chemistry than any which had previously been described.
Joseph Black
History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past.
E. H. Carr
