Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.

We should explore ways to make us a more amazing species. A more fascinating society. We should embrace our innovations and evolve with them.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

Man has now become an adjunct to perfect and carry forward these conquests.

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

To-day it appears as though it may well be altogether abolished in the future as it has to some extent been mitigated in the past by the unceasing, and as it now appears, unlimited ascent of man to knowledge, and through knowledge to physical power and dominion over Nature.

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference?

Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

Every day sees humanity more victorious in the struggle with space and time.

We're the first technology-creating species. We use technology to extend our reach. We didn't stay in the caves, and we haven't stayed on the planet. To play jazz with our genomes and the universe might ultimately be what we're all about.

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

I have always believed that technology drives human civilization's endeavor and progress.

At the core of 'Star Trek' is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.

It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.

I believed that once we got to the Moon, there was no stopping us. But in fact, we did stop.

The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic.

One of the chief inhibitions to human progress arises because of the extreme slowness with which the advances in knowledge become translated into action for the benefit of society as a whole. There is no step more important for the removal of that inhibition than that of providing for intimate contact between the leaders in the fields of pure and applied science.

The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

There are two things that have been true throughout history in big hunks. You can find differences in ten years, but in 50 year hunks, 100 years hunks, you'll find two things to be true. One, the world is always getting better. Two, people always think it's getting worse.

The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.

This is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight, we have given the lie to gravity.We have reached for the stars.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?