False Progress Quotes

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.

You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress.

My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist!

It leads to a false belief in America that we have taken great step forward. It does not contribute in any way to settling matters of international controversy.

specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.

We've come a long way, we've come a long way and we never even left L.A.

Mankind is getting smarter every day. Actually, it only seems so. At least we are making progress. We're progressing, to be sure, ever more deeply into the forest.

Who can be against progress, after all? But it's a fraudulent use of the word - because for the Progressive, progress is marked not be how free you are, but how much government can 'do' for you.

Without gospel truths, man's efforts to reach his goals are like the northbound explorer who drove his dog sled feverishly northward on an ice pack that was flowing southward - only to find himself farther from his destination at the end of a hard day's journey than he had been at dawn!

We have embraced the 21st century by entering such cutting-edge industries as brick, carpet, insulation and paint. Try to control your excitement.

I think when you congratulate yourselves for diversity, that means nothing's really changed.

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.

Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures. ... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies. ... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable.

Many hammer all over the wall and believe that with each blow they hit the nail on the head.

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

Nothing recedes like progress.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting a compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.

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.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

He who thinks he is raising a mound may only in reality be digging a pit.