Random Quotes about Progress

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. (George Bernard Shaw)

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long. (Ogden Nash)

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer. (George Santayana )

The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer. (Fridtjof Nansen)

We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice. (Woody Allan)

Without deviation, progress is not possible. (Frank Zappa}

It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to unlearn. (Isaac Asimov)

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. (Henry Havelock Ellis)

Technological progress is like a fragile and vulnerable plant, whose flourishing is not only dependent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short. It is highly sensitive to the social and economic environment and can be easily arrested. (Joel Mokyr)

Change is one thing, progress is another. Change is scientific, progress is ethical. Change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy. (Bertrand Russell)

Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress. (Thomas Edison)

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. (Bill Gates)

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

The technology life cycle has three stages: Hype, disillusionment, and application. (Bob Lewis)

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow. (Edward Teller)

All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. (Samuel Butler)

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (George Santayana)

The most damaging phrase in the language is, "It's always been done that way." (Rear Admiral Grace Hopper)

So much havoc has optimism wrought in this world that pessimism appears not only a legitimate way of looking at things but a moral duty. (Christopher Spranger)

Quality has to be caused, not controlled. (Philip Crosby)

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)

Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. (Fred Brooks)

FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products. (Gene Amdahl)

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems. (Rear Admiral Grace Hopper)

The network, by and large, starts to behave like a sea of computation on which you go rafting. (James Gosling)

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens. (Benjamin Disraeli)

In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. (Ada Lovelace)

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact. (Thomas H Huxley)

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. (W Edwards Deming)

All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. (George Bernard Shaw)

It is a bad plan that admits of no modifications. (Publius Syrus)

When you see a good idea look for a better one. You should never play the first good move that comes into your head. (Bruce Pandolfine)

Experts in advanced countries underestimate by a factor of two to four the ability of people in underdeveloped countries to do anything technical. (Charles P Issawi)

Technology is like fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes. (Andrew Heller)

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention largely because they regard such departure as criticism of themselves. (Bertrand Russell)

The illusion of progress can be achieved by simply rearranging the terms of description so that new acronyms are created. (Scott Smith)

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. (Albert Einstein)

In contrast to people, computers double their ability every 18 months. There therefore exists the possibility that machines will develop intelligence and dominate the world. (Stephen Hawking)

The best way to be ready for the future is to invent it. (John Sculley)

When change is discontinuous, the success stories of yesterday have little relevance to the problems of tomorrow. (Charles Handy)

Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. (Robert A Heinlein)

I have my own nomination for an "idea that, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity": Banning technological progress in the name of humility. (Ronald Bailey)

Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. (Kenich Ohmae)

Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things. (Robert Heinlein)

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. (Alfred North Whitehead)

Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration. (Pierre-Simon Laplace)

Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress that its law-and-order alternatives. (Paul Feyerabend)

As for the future, your task is not to foresee but to enable it. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. (John von Neumann)

The nature of exponentials is that if you extrapolate them far enough you always get a disaster. (Gordon Moore)

Fifty years into the First Computing Era some of us in the computing arena have come to realize we’ve made a false start, and for us to finally be able to produce lasting, correct, beautiful, usable, scalable, enjoyable software that stands the tests of time and moral human endeavor, we need to start over. (Richard P Gabriel)

Progress is what happens when impossibility yields to necessity. (Arnold J Glasow)

SOURCE