True Progress Quotes

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops,—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don't know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.

Railroads? Electric telegraphs? All honour to them in their place: but they are not progress; they are only the fruits of past progress. No outward and material thing is progress; no machinery causes progress; it merely spreads and makes popular the results of progress. Progress is inward, of the soul.

We need to make material progress, but we need inner development too ... remember that the real development we seek is not in the buildings but in our hearts and minds.

Every so often we hear people clamor for a change. Let's change the Constitution, change the form of Government, change everything for better or worse except to change the only thing that needs changing first: The human heart and our standard of success and human values.

Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see... rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.

True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice.

Even if a country has money and technology, if it is retarded spiritually or morally, we cannot say it is advanced.

Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but simply change the faces of those in charge.

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

I think that it's when we step out of the road, step outside the box, become our own person, and we walk fearlessly down paths other people wouldn't look at, that true progress comes. And sometimes true beauty as well.

CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.

vivisection is not the same thing as scientific progress. There is such a thing as scientific progress. But this wholesale dedication of scientists to vivisection, which is the easy and cheap way, actually prevents them from scientific progress, for true progress is difficult and requires genius and imagination in its devoted workers.

Intellectually, as politically, the direction of all true progress is towards greater freedom, and along an endless succession of ideas.