A great part of progress consists in the desire to make progress.
To progress, it is not enough to want to act, one must first know in which direction to act.
Don’t wait for Plato’s Republic! Rather, be content if one tiny thing makes some progress, and reflect on the fact that what results from this tiny thing is no tiny thing at all!
The real democratic progress is not to lower the level of the elite toward that of the crowd, but to raise that of the crowd toward the elite.
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world : the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
A thousand things advance, nine hundred and ninety-eight fall back, this is progress.
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities—perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.
Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
