William H. Seward Quotes

If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.

For still the new transcends the old In signs and tokens manifold; Slaves rise up men; the olive waves, With roots deep set in battle graves!

Progress of any kind is always at variance with the old and established ideas and therefore with the codes inspired by them. Every step of progress is a change involving heavy risks.

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

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

Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on.

… all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Revolutions never go backward.

You have to go with the times. You're going to get left behind if you don't.

Modernity is disruptive, and I endorse that.

We live in a bubble of progression, and over the last eight years [of Barack Obama], we've been a country of progression.

If God had intended that man should go backward, he would have given him eyes in the back of his head.

Science is not about status quo. It's about revolution.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

Nothing has changed, or will change. So we must change it.

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.

In every department of life--in its business and in its pleasures, in its beliefs and in its theories, in its material developments and in its spiritual connections--we thank God that we are not like our fathers.

We don't have a revolution, and we don't have the time for evolution, where does it come from? It must come from some kind of shared experience that everybody agrees with.

Revolution is obstructed evolution.

We're in the midst of an evolution, not a revolution.

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.