Improvement Quotes - page 16
We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.
Lewis Thomas
Oh, for the farm where a man is truly independent, and where he deals with fundamentals, where the changing seasons brings changed work, and a man is out of doors all the time. It is on the farm that a man can devote his life to his investment and see the improvement and growth from year to year...I enjoy thinking of such things and there is no doubt that I am a midwesterner through and through.
Nile Kinnick
A knowledge of Mendelism is recognized by me as only the ABC to the broader knowledge of heredity necessary for success in animal and plant improvement, and all variations and all mutations of every nature are responses to environment which, by repetition and combination, are slowly but surely fixed in heredity and at last made tangible, most often through the crossing of varieties, species, or genera, either by nature or that part of nature called man.
Luther Burbank
It is increasingly necessary to impress the fact that there are two distinct lines in the improvement of any race: the environment which brings individuals up to their best possibilities; the other, ten thousand times more important and effective, selection of the best individuals through a series of generations.
Luther Burbank
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principle enemy of moral progress in the world.
Bertrand Russell
It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share. I do not mean that the condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power.
Henry George
I will make my meaning more clear when I say that I think right and wrong are both tools which are being wielded by those great hands which are shaping the destinies of the universe, that both are making for improvement; but that the action of the one is immediate, and that of the other more slow, but none the less certain. Our own distinction of right and wrong is founded too much upon the immediate convenience of the community, and does not inquire sufficiently deeply into the ultimate effect.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The followers of Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But Parmenides' disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any perception of motion and change is illusory. Reality had to be motionless.
The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. "Man is the measure of all things."
Robert M. Pirsig
If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost; many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making.
David Hume
