Cheikh Anta Diop Quotes

It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.

In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,--if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,--and they are themselves so much the better morally for it.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

… evolving standards of decency … mark the progress of a maturing society

We must wait for the slow progress of moral causes

History is a record of the gradual negation of man’s original bestiality by the evolution of his humanity.

Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.

We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.

I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.

years ago we would have been burned for this. Now what I am suggesting is that we've advanced.

I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

For humanity has moved forward to an era when wrong and slavery are being displaced, and reason and justice are being recognized as the rule of life.

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.

There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.

We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit.

It has been women who have breathed gentleness and care into the hard progress of humankind.

The evil arising from mental improvement can be corrected only by a still further progress in that very improvement. Either morality is a fable, or the more enlightened we are, the more attached to it we become.

Humanism is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress for the benefit of all.

Every age has its problem, by solving which humanity is helped forward.