Paul Theroux Quotes

He who does not advance, retreats.

It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

Unless you go forward then you are going back.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

No movement can afford to be caught in a time warp and exist in a state of suspended animation.

I think we were all initially swept along with the Obama win, but he's proven to be simply a set of teeth, and useless in every other regard.

When you look at - when you talk to people in Africa and across the Middle East, they're not satisfied with the way things are going. Sure, this idea of democracy was injected into the region, but it has brought mostly chaos.

If you're not growing, you're dying, and I'm not ready for that.

At a certain point, people in Panama thought that everything was going to be solved as soon as Noriega was gone. Of course, the disappointment was huge.

Staying stagnant is not okay.

I dug deep, and I found that there were people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump - because they saw what they believed was going to be hope and change, and under Obama, their particular lives did not change.

America can't go sideways anymore.

I don't believe in stasis - either you are growing or dying.

If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.

Personally, I've decided to stop evolving.

Who does not grow, declines.

To stand still is to regress.

Life does not stand still. Where there is no progress, there is disintegration.

To keep always in the same place means to stagnate.

You are either getting better or getting worse, but you are never staying the same.

Either you're growing or you're decaying; there's no middle ground. If you're standing still, you're decaying.

Every day you either get better or you get worse. You never stay the same.

Where there's no progress, there's no growth. If there's no growth, there's no life. Environments void of change are eventually void of life.

From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets.