Cyclical Progress Quotes

Progress leads to confusion leads to progress and on and on without respite. Every one of the many major advances … created sooner or later, more often sooner, new problems. These confusions, never twice the same, are not to be deplored. Rather, those who participate experience them as a privilege.

Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.

Any study of a society shows that every solution creates a new situation which breeds its own new needs and problems, new demands.

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.

Predictions of America’s decline are as old as the republic. But they perform a critical function in driving the kind of renewal that is required of each generation of Americans….as long as we’re worried about the future, the future will be better.

One generation's reform becomes the next generation's problem.

There have always been a large class of thinkers who deny that the world makes any progress. They say we move in a circle; that evils are never conquered, but only change their forms.

Humanity is a crazy contradiction. I accept us for who we are. We're not that great. Every time we take a step forward we go back to the same primitive behavior. We're meant to be this way. It's not our fault, it's just who we are.

We're making the same mistakes we made 1,000 years ago. So they must be the right ones. So relax.

I do not believe in eternal progress, that we are growing on ever and ever in a straight line. It is too nonsensical to believe. There is no motion in a straight line. A straight line infinitely projected becomes a circle. The force sent out will complete the circle and return to its starting place.

Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.

What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.

But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

The human mind always makes progress, but it is in spirals.

The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.

There's this Indian fellow who worked out a cycle like the idea of stone-age, bronze-age, only he did it on an Indian one. The cycle goes from nothing until now and 20th century and then on and right around the cycle until the people are really grooving and then just sinks back into ignorance until it gets back into the beginning again. So the 20th century is a fraction of that cycle, and how many of those cycles has it done yet? It's done as many as you think and all these times it's been through exactly the same things, and it'll be this again.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.

If the world does improve on the whole, yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning.

Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.

It's always been the children who have saved the universe from the previous generation and remade the universe in their own image.

Nothing seems to me more doubtful than Aristotle's remark that it is probable the arts and philosophy have several times been discovered and several times lost.

Broadway is the same as Hollywood. Every few years we say we reached the mountaintop, then we take two steps back.

We just feel like history repeats itself. You ain't never going to see nothing brand new; you're only going to see when records are broken. And we're here to just set records and set trends and follow the footsteps that have been shown to us.