Perfection of effort is not required, by the way. It is the consistency of attempting to work these tools that brings the progress. It’s like anything else. If I want to tone muscle, lifting a ten-pound weight a few times every day will move me tow...
The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tri...
One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it s...
We cannot see how the evidence afforded by the unquestioned progressive development of organised existence—crowned as it has been by the recent creation of the earth's greatest wonder, MAN, can be set aside, or its seemingly necessary result withhe...
I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors...
When you decide that you are going to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes, sometime during your seemingly infinite journey the weathervane will just change direction and the new winds of positive change will blow at your back instead of into...
Louis: Then out of curiosity, boredom, who knows what, I left the old world and came back to my America. And there, a mechanical wonder allowed me to see the sun rise for the first time in two hundred years. And what sunrises, seen as the human eye c...
My teacher, Ben Johnston, was convinced that our tuning is responsible for much of our cultural psychology, the fact that we are so geared toward progress and action and violence and so little attuned to introspection, contentment, and acquiescence. ...
True thinking takes place within a frame of continuous historical development in which progress in understanding is being made. . . . No constructive thinking that is worth while can be undertaken that sets at nought the intellectual labours of the c...
The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to t...
One wrong move, one bad rumor, one mistake, and it's social death row. I'm the latest to be sentenced. Move out of the way, everyone. Dead girl walking. -Riley
The time has come, that man should change his ideas to respect the woman and woman should her to trust the man. Now social interactions need a better way to grow up.
Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.
The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundament...
The social custom of calling on people when they are unwell has always mystified me. By definition, you’re not feeling or looking your best. Why on earth do people assume you might want visitors?
Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.
The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.
That Newton shuddered now [at slavery] is a testimony to they way a strong social movement can awaken a conscience..
It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes ...
Even if people do wrong, we're social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evil' is just an unwillingness to engage; an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attit...
There's something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gi...
