c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
As a society, we've become suspicious of such acts. Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we've turned the Luddites into caricatures, emblems of backwardness. We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That's the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly.
— Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us
So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.
— Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
Those who hear this solemn call of life and respond with the corresponding supply receive progress in life.
— Sunday Adelaja
Progress, You can see how well you are doing on achieving your goals, after you start something.
— Auliq Ice
In his mind progress was always to be measured in inches, especially when you didn’t have yards or even feet of success to show off.
— David Baldacci, Memory Man
We must intentionally push ourselves out of our comfort zones if we are to make any significant progress on this side of life.
— Sunday Adelaja
Your reaction towards your inception will determine the input towards your progression
— Goitsemang Mvula
War erases progress, leaves no trace of improvement.
— Graeme    Smith
If there is progress anywhere it is because there has been people who worked for it not just prayed for it.
— Sunday Adelaja
Much of our time is spent just maintaining our emotional lives and physical conditions. To move ahead, we often have to clear a trail as we go. Progress and development do not occur without change in our motivations and actions.
— James H. Bae
Domestic terrorism is alive and well in the USA and it is masquerading as “Progress”.
— Steven Magee, Curing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity
Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something.
— Indira Gandhi
But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder
Soaring is in stages, it progresses as you engage in the very art.
— TemitOpe Ibrahim
Most men can make moves, decisions, mistakes, plans, money, babies, love, war, progress, or even history. Not all men have what it takes to make a worthwhile difference in this world. Substance, drive, dedication, intelligence, faith and values; that comes from within. Its not what a MAN can make but what a MAN is made of that's impressive.
— Carlos Wallace, Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments Into Your Greatest Blessings
Progress is impossible without accurate planning.
— Sunday Adelaja
In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.
— Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife
We are confusing making “progress” with eradicating the larger problem.
— Carlos Wallace
I don't like straight lines: men make them.
— Richard Adams
Progress isn’t always good. There’s a reason why ‘breakneck speed’ is described as such.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer's Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 3
Your progress as a Jiu Jitsu practitioner is a direct reflection of the standards you have for yourself.
— Chris Matakas, My Mastery: Continued Education Through Jiu Jitsu
Progress however slow is still progress, but be it for the better if sped up quicker.
— Solange nicole
On Tuesday December seventh a lot of good things happened: they took the trach out, took the cast off my leg, and my PT, Maria, had me standing.
— Amy Rankin, Nobody Thought I Could Do It, But I Showed Them, and So Can You!
Then the Dean repeated the mantra that has had such a marked effect on the progress of knowledge throughout the ages.“Why don’t we just mix up absolutely everything and see what happens?” he said.And Ridcully responded with the traditional response.“It’s got to be worth a try,” he said.
— Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
To restrict oneself and somewhat settle under a particular sexual essence is to limit our expression and individual progress.
— Nityananda Das, Divine Union
I realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that humanity has advanced so far in spite of them. & now I am in the fight to change things. I may be a dreamer, but dreamers are necessary to make facts!
— Helen Keller, Rebel Lives: Helen Keller
People can believe in their own progress and success. They can even believe in strangers success. But when it comes to success of anyone from their social circle, they think, it must be by fluke and the other person doesn't deserve it.
— Shon Mehta, Modern Parables
Don't let proud get to your head, always humble yourself.
— Henry Johnson Jr
It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery
—  we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
Man’s collective mastery of nature— even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion— can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life.
— Christopher Lasch
Success or Failure, there should always be a Drive to Keep on Creating.
— Henry Johnson Jr
Life without making progress is dead. What is life if you don't embrace new truths that scare you, meet people who intimidate you, and so on.
— Assegid Habtewold, The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For Continued Success in Leadership
Making a lifestyle change is challenging, especially when you want to transform many things at once, you better start with one, when you see the change you'll have an automatic motivation entering into your life.
— Auliq Ice
There is no night in the life of brave, just like there is much rest in the hearts of the lazy ones.
— Auliq Ice
Without wonder, there's no progress. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. If you don't exercise your capacity for wonder... well, use it or lose it. A civilization without wonder is a civilization that's starting to atrophy and die.
— Brian Hodge, Whom the Gods Would Destroy
Today you are more inclined to put your ideas and visions into action than usual were you have the ability to express yourself and solve problems alone.
— Auliq Ice
One day you'll notice something different and if you take advantage of that moment, you will be what you exactly needed to be.
— Auliq Ice
All Medicines are poisons, and all poisons should be looked at for medicinal properties.
— Pain Pus and Poison
Life is more than just a bump in the road. All life is sacred.
— Donald L. Hicks, Look into the stillness
History is a set of repeating circles, like the tide. The wind does blow through the ruins of tomorrow. But it is more a question of two steps forward, one step back. Humans and dragons make the same mistakes, again and again, but things do get better over time
— Cressida Cowell
Progress is much more better than perfect.
— Toba Beta
War is progress, peace is stagnation
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Today I will work when others procrastinate, I will confront my fears when others hide from theirs, and I will create solutions when others find excuses; today I refuse to allow my enemies to out work me.
— Noel DeJesus
The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and its errors, its successes and its setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned.
— Dag Hammarskjöld
The promoters of emancipation were not bent on promoting a revolution so much as they were intent on snuffing one out – a backward-looking, aristocratic revolution – in order to put the South back on the track it should have been on from the beginning of the republic.
— Allen C. Guelzo
Progress is made by walking down the path, more progress is made, by walking down the right path.
— Dixie Waters
Think about the change that the world experiences without the aid of the right people and those who love and appreciate the presence of nature.
— Auliq Ice
Progress means to be true to the world, If we need to make a change.
— Auliq Ice
These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel.
— Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
Whenever you see a new day and your simply doing right, you're saving it in the list of your best days indirectly.
— Auliq Ice
To progress isn’t a little step, it’s a pretty dramatic lifestyle change.
— Auliq Ice
You Life is a progress, and not a station.
— - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Destiny is a right destination for every nation with a mission of destiny.
— Oscar AULIQ-ICE Jr
Killing people isn't progress.
— Athan Fletcher, The Swordsman and The Priestess
Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let's be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, A Family Collection: Life on the Farm and in the Country, Making a Home; the Ways of the World, a Woman's Role
Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual -- from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual -- whether this be animal or plant or man -- is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is foredoomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the "have-been" works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hybris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about "undying achievements"?
— Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life
The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.
— Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
In the race of life, the Person leading is the Enemy of All those coming Behind.
— Ademiju Ige
Those whose eyes twenty-five and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some—such as Josie, Jim, and Ben—to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.
— Nate Silver
Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.
— Nate Silver
the progress of real purpose is crippled where lack of money is equated to lack of zeal
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
When you violate the law of growth, your influence winds down, your progress gets arrested, and many more negative consequences...
— Assegid Habtewold, The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For Continued Success in Leadership
Empirical proof doesn't drive progress. Progress is driven by curiosity, something we all have built into us. Empirical proof is a safety net for those uncomfortable with the unknown.
— Athan Fletcher, The Swordsman and The Priestess
Have you no idea of progress, of development?""I have seen them both in an egg," said Caspian. "We call it 'Going Bad' in Narnia
— C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution, and its fixation on efficiency. A new master exported by England across the globe, so that in the developed world at least everyone has one wrist on which is clamped the new and unforgiving shackle we call a watch. In less pressurised days, men observed the ageing of the universe through the more sedate changing of the seasons. But no more. Now the hour is king, or the minute and sometimes even the second. We are all people in a rush, where speed is of the essence, and slow is often deployed as a term of abuse.
— John Dolan, Everyone Burns
Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.
— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
exercises helps you to monitor your progress in any field
— Kishore Bansal
Any place where women are not respected or provided enough opportunities to grow and develop, cannot be a progressive place.
— Tapan Singhel
The master action to move forward, is a form of inaction; being still and quiet.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
There is really only one true way to progress
—  fix yourself.
You don’t have to submerge. Just take a D.I.P. in Daily Incremental Progress.
— Ryan Lilly
They make only progress. Instead of revenge, self progress is more safe to downgrade others including enemy.
— M.K. Bhutta
Information paints no picture, sings no song, and writes no poem.
— R.F. Georgy, Notes from the Cafe
We have an infinite supply of information and yet we cannot read.
— R.F. Georgy
Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman question, but not yet.""The time to assert one's right is when it's denied!
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings
For us to progress, we must be community in liberty, equality and fraternity.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Our politicians, by their words and policies, either expand or contract the frontiers of freedom. We the people either monitor and encourage its progress, or witness and suffer its decline. (Scott L. Vanatter)
— Scott L. Vanatter
If you always read the same old ideas, what progress can you make in the name of discovering new paths?
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Knowledge of Nature is an account at bank, where each dividend is added to the principal and the interest is ever compounded; and hence it is that human progress, founded on natural knowledge, advances with ever increasing speed.
— Grove Karl Gilbert
I'm not afraid of heights,I actually want to go higher.
— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe, This Is My Life
In the decades following the Revolution, America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change, but came to expected and prize it.
— Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
Progress apart from purpose ends in arrogance.
— T.D. Jakes, Reposition Yourself: Living Life Without Limits
It surely can be no offence to state, that the progress of science has led to new views, and that the consequences that can be deduced from the knowledge of a hundred facts may be very different from those deducible from five. It is also possible that the facts first known may be the exceptions to a rule and not the rule itself, and generalisations from these first-known facts, though useful at the time, may be highly mischievous, and impede the progress of the science if retained when it has made some advance.
— Henry Thomas De la Beche
I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done.
— Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire
Don't try to wring out all the answers before you move forward. Faith doesn't work that way. Step into the darkness and the light will appear to guide your next step. It's that first step into the unknown that stops us from progressing.
— Toni Sorenson
So what if you're scared spitless? So what if you're intimidated, insecure or inundated with doubt? If it's the thing that will advance you, do it anyway. Forward movement always begins with an inward decision.
— Toni Sorenson
The fifties is a decade when every year is markedly different from the one before and after. That doesn't happen every decade. 1983 isn't that much different from 1986. But 1953 is very different from 1956.
— Sara Sheridan
Motivation is the essence of human progress.
— Yahya Mohamed
Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.
— Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination
Well,” Han said with a sigh, “we’ve gone from no-plan to stupid-plan. That’s progress of a sort.
— James S.A. Corey, Honor Among Thieves
Everything flows and nothing stays.
— Heraclitus
As much as we all know that some things are easier said than done, we have to understand that if we don't say it, we may never do it.
— Stephan Labossiere
[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a bend in the road.(Opening address to the Mechanical Science Section, Meeting of the British Association, Manchester.)
— Osborne Reynolds
Every past is worth condemning.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Knowledge is fundamental to all human achievements and progress. It is both the key and the quest that advances mankind. The search for knowledge is what brought men to the moon; but it took knowledge already acquired to make it possible to get there.How we use the knowledge we gain determines our progress on earth, in space or on the moon. Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it 
— Neil Armstrong
Two-thirds of all preachers, doctors and lawyers are hanging on to the coat tails of progress, shouting, whoa! while a good many of the rest are busy strewing banana peels along the line of march.
— Elbert Hubbard
Time waits for no man, but progress waits for man to inact it.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
But if it be true, as every prospect assures us, that the human race shall not again relapse into its ancient barbarity; if every thing ought to assure us against that pusillanimous and corrupt system which condemns man to eternal oscillations between truth and falsehood, liberty and servitude, we must, at the same time, perceive that the light of information is spread over a small part only of our globe; and the number of those who possess real instruction, seems to vanish in the comparison with the mass of men consigned over to ignorance and prejudice. We behold vast countries groaning under slavery, and presenting nations in one place, degraded by the vices of civilization, so corrupt as to impede the progress of man; and in others, still vegetating in the infancy of its early age. We perceive that the exertions of these last ages have done much for the progress of the human mind, but little for the perfection of the human species; much for the glory of man, somewhat for his liberty, but scarcely any thing yet for his happiness. In a few directions, our eyes are struck with a dazzling light; but thick darkness still covers an immense horison.
— Nicolas de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind
I am well convinced that Aerial Navigation will form a most prominent feature in the progress of civilization. (1804)
— George Cayley
The progress of mankind is due exclusively to the progress of natural sciences, not to morals, religion or philosophy.
— Justus von Liebig
The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities
—  the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict that any of its successors can be more important in the life of any nation.
Progress is the product of human agency. Things get better because we make them better.
— Susan Rice
For the land's sake, Sarah Gale, let the earth turn on its axis, and don't be forever tryin' to stop it. There ain't but one law of progress, so far as I know, and that's by changes.
— Harriet A. Nash, Polly's Secret
My life hasn't been perfect, yet I've never wasted my time envying anyone else. If something wasn't the best it could be - I made it better.
— Aleatha Romig, Convicted
I know that certain minds would regard as audacious the idea of relating the laws which preside over the play of our organs to those laws which govern inanimate bodies; but, although novel, this truth is none the less incontestable. To hold that the phenomena of life are entirely distinct from the general phenomena of nature is to commit a grave error, it is to oppose the continued progress of science.
— François Magendie
Let us hush this cry of 'Forward', till ten thousand years have gone.
— Alfred Tennyson, Loksley Hall, Day Dream and Other Poems
My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word "progress." At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress, I was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies to the only important question-"Where are we to steer?"-by saying, "We are being carried somewhere.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture.
— Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky
To be "modern" means refusing to worry about where the benefits of progress actually come from.
— Sylvain Tesson, Dans les forêts de Sibérie
Time... is an essential requirement for effective research. An investigator may be given a palace to live in, a perfect laboratory to work in, he may be surrounded by all the conveniences money can provide; but if his time is taken from him he will remain sterile.
— Walter Bradford Cannon
Progress has not brought about universal happiness...
— Adam Leith Gollner, The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever
A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.
— P.M.S. Blackett
This is what progress does, you know. Each step into the future makes us ever so much grander and more demanding and thus ever so slightly less human.
— Kim   Wright, City of Light
My life has a mysterious purpose that I don't understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Interlude: A Special Odd Thomas Adventure
Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.
— Robert Graves
The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.
— Richard Feynman
If everybody followed the rules, nothing would ever change. Without change there would be no progress
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
I stand beside Tom's barn and ponder the benign heedlessness of the people in the speeding cars, and here I am in the speeding car. In my heart I wish the bypass had never been built; in my car I never take the old way.
— Michael Perry, Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace
togetherness brings progress.
— Adeleke Tomiwa
You have something important to add, so you interrupt an exciting conversation already in progress just to let us know you have nothing to contribute to the discussion. Umm....”— Troy Ragland
— Troy Ragland
In all, Nigeria belongs to us all and we have a personal responsibility to see that it succeeds
— Fela Durotoye
Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.
— R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
I'm starting with the man in the mirror
— Michael  Jackson
Change often brings unimagined opportunity...If there is no struggle, there is no progress. To live in a safe cocoon- I believe that is not truly living. It is stagnation.
— Syrie James, The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen
In all things it is better to hope than to despair.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Never restart a journey and use the same road that failed you before.
— Dennis E. Adonis
Rights are not easy to obtain, and once we understand this, we must work attentively and persistently - and never become careless or lazy.
— Malalai Joya, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice
When used as a tool, fear will enhance your preparedness; when used as a guide, it will stop your progress.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Progress is not about hating or destroying America, it is about loving and building the world, which can only come from healing our national dementia.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
For those that think men make progress collectively, I warn you, history teaches: You couldn’t be more wrong.
— Glenn Beck
Hey, you know I might not be perfect! But I'm a wonderful work in progress!
— D.C. Akers
We're better off. But I don't know if the world's better off. I don't know if the two are the same thing.
— Rachel Cohn, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
...there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigor of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education
[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.
— Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life
I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.
— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Progress is hard on history.
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf balls.
— T.S. Eliot
So we are steaming along without any landmark
—  we can't gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It's not navigation but dreaming.
I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.
— Alasdair Gray, Poor Things
Where there is will there is a way Where there is a way there is progress And where there is progress there is change.
— Amit Abraham
We're Human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill, today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill, today.
— Robert Hamner, A Taste of Armageddon
He looked at her defiantly, and she thought: and so one at a time we all become human—human werewolves, human dwarfs, human trolls …the melting pot melts in one direction only, and so we make progress.
— Terry Pratchett
In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.
— Matt Ridley
Change is inevitable, progress is not.
— Max McKeown, The Truth About Innovation
It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! ("Jane Brown's Body")
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
Today...major actors and actresses develop their own projects or, at the very least, cherry-pick their roles carefully to suit not only their tastes but also whatever image they have cultivated to present to their public. Most major stars have their own production companies through which such projects are developed and even financed. While the biggest male stars of that time did in fact have their own production companies--Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster, to name a few--and thus exerted creative and financial control over their careers, that was not the case with female stars. But Marilyn Monroe was about to change that.
— J. Randy Taraborrelli, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe
Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.
— Richard John Neuhaus, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile
Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind.
— Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization
Do you want to make progress? If so, then take each problem not as a challenging rival, but as an encouraging friend of yours, who is helping you to arrive at your ultimate destination.
— Sri Chinmoy, The Jewels of Happiness: Inspiration and Wisdom to Guide Your Life-Journey
A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it's going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that's available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.
— Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography
The word "impossible" is only in the mindAnd not in the heart.If we can remain in the heart,There will be no end to our progress.
— Sri Chinmoy, The Jewels of Happiness: Inspiration and Wisdom to Guide Your Life-Journey
We must begin where we are and move forward immediately by starting small and capitalizing on what's at hand.
— Mike Schmoker, Results
Don't waste tomorrow on yesterday.
— Orrin Woodward
There'a a phrase, "the elephant in the living room", which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, "How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn't you see the elephant in the living room?" And it's so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; "I'm sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture." There comes an aha-moment for some folks - the lucky ones - when they suddenly recognize the difference.
— Stephen King
YOUR ABUSIVE PARTNER DOESN’T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH HIS ANGER; HE HAS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR ANGER.One of the basic human rights he takes away from you is the right to be angry with him. No matter how badly he treats you, he believes that your voice shouldn’t rise and your blood shouldn’t boil. The privilege of rage is reserved for him alone. When your anger does jump out of you—as will happen to any abused woman from time to time—he is likely to try to jam it back down your throat as quickly as he can. Then he uses your anger against you to prove what an irrational person you are. Abuse can make you feel straitjacketed. You may develop physical or emotional reactions to swallowing your anger, such as depression, nightmares, emotional numbing, or eating and sleeping problems, which your partner may use as an excuse to belittle you further or make you feel crazy.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
Don't judge yourself by what others did to you.
— C. Kennedy, Ómorphi
God wants you to be delivered from what you have done and from what has been done to you - Both are equally imporant to Him.
— Joyce Meyer, Beauty for Ashes: Receiving Emotional Healing
Who said 'please' that made you hate the word so much?"Andrew gazed at him in silence for a minute. "I did.
— Nora Sakavic, The King's Men
The scars from mental cruelty can be as deep and long-lasting as wounds from punches or slaps but are often not asobvious. In fact, even among women who have experienced violence from a partner, half or more report that the man’s emotional abuse is what is causing them the greatest harm.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Why isn't there a commandment to "honor thy children" or at least one to "not abuse thy children"? The notion that we must honor our parents causes many people to bury their real feelings and set aside their own needs in order to have a relationship with people they would otherwise not associate with. Parents, like anyone else, need to earn respect and honor, and honoring parents who are negative and abusive is not only impossible but extremely self-abusive. Perhaps, as with anything else, honoring our parents starts with honoring ourselves. For many adult children, honoring themselves means not having anything to do with one or both of their parents.
— Beverly Engel, Divorcing a Parent
Has he ever trapped you in a room and not let you out?Has he ever raised a fist as if he were going to hit you?Has he ever thrown an object that hit you or nearly did?Has he ever held you down or grabbed you to restrain you?Has he ever shoved, poked, or grabbed you?Has he ever threatened to hurt you?If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we can stop wondering whether he’ll ever be violent; he already has been.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up with more demands because he believes his needs are your responsibility, until you feel drained down to nothing.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
crawling up into daddy's lapwhen dad was stillDADDYnodding my head against his chest soaking in the comfort of his heartLISTENINGto the thump...thumpsomewhere beneath muscleand breastbone I remember his armstheir sublimeENCIRCLINGand the shawdow of his voice"I love you, little girl.Put away your bad dreams.Daddy's here"I put them away, Until Daddy became my nightmare that one that cameHOMEfrom work everyday and insteadof picking me up, chased me farfaraway
— Ellen Hopkins, Identical
A man with a club [bat] is a law-maker, a man to be obeyed, but not necessarily conciliated.
— Jack London, The Call of the Wild
Arguments cannot be answered by personal abuse; there is no logic in slander, and falsehood, in the long run, defeats itself.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
The abusive man’s high entitlement leads him to have unfair and unreasonable expectations, so that the relationship revolves around his demands. His attitude is: “You owe me.” For each ounce he gives, he wants a pound in return. He wants his partner to devote herself fully to catering to him, even if it means that her own needs—or her children’s—get neglected. You can pour all your energy into keeping your partner content, but if he has this mind-set, he’ll never be satisfied for long. And he will keep feeling that you are controlling him, because he doesn’t believe that you should set any limits on his conduct or insist that he meet his responsibilities.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.
— Tacitus
Disrespect also can take the form of idealizing you and putting you on a pedestal as a perfect woman or goddess, perhaps treating you like a piece of fine china. The man who worships you in this way is not seeing you; he is seeing his fantasy, and when you fail to live up to that image he may turn nasty. So there may not be much difference between the man who talks down to you and the one who elevates you; both are displaying a failure to respect you as a real human being and bode ill.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
It ain’t how hard you are when you’re standing over top of someone that really matters. It’s how hard you are when someone’s standing over top of you that shows what you’re made of.
— Cedric Nye, Jango's Anthem
I am a fan of overdoing something, but not running it into the ground. They are complete opposites with only a fine line separating them.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Oh, I know that she's disgusted,cause she's feeling so abused.She gets tired of the lust,but it's so hard to refuse.
— Elvis Costello
I don't want you to have to handle it. That's the horror of my past. But you...you're the reality of my present. You're the proof I survived. The prize in the cereal box.
— J. Kenner, Complete Me
I wondered about her chicken-and-egg relationship with Dad. Which came first? Her helplessness or his controlling?
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
What are you going to do? Are you going to live in the dark, locked in here? Afraid to look out, answer the door, leave? Yes, he's out there, and he's clearly not going to leave you alone until one of three things happens: he hurts you and gets arrested, or he makes a mistake and gets arrested, or you stop him.
— Rachel Caine, Fall of Night
...when a wife wouldn't testify, little punishment was meted out. Alex came to understand that only those who pressed charges ever became truly free, because the life they were leading was a prison, even if most of them wouldn't admit it.
— Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven
Maybe one is enough
— Swati Avasthi, Split
...Incest is rape by extortion. Thus the child's very childhood becomes a weapon used to control her.
— E. Sue Blume, Secret Survivors
They don't like the thought of someone else making demands on the person whom they see as belonging entirely to them.
— Jodi Picoult, Picture Perfect
But for a mother who was submissive to the degree my mother was, it was OK to kill girls. For a father like mine, it was normal to chop off his daughters hair with sheep shears, and to beat her with a belt or a cane or tie her up in the stable all night with the cows.
— Souad, Burned Alive
It is fine to commiserate with a man about his bad experience with a previous partner, but the instant he uses her as an excuse to mistreat you, stop believing anything he tells you about that relationship and instead recognize it as a sign that he has problems with relating to women.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
i sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
JUST LISTEN“When your mind is quiet and you listen closely, you will hear the children weeping silently. If you can’t quite hear their cries, then listen with your eyes. These are the children of the streets, who have learned pain and suffering before they ever had a chance to experience life. Do not ignore their cries for help, for all they wish is that you will rescue them. They do not have a family that wants them, they don’t know how it feels to be loved and they’ve never lived anywhere that felt like home…the streets are where they find their voice and relief from all of the suffering.Just listen and you’ll see them.
— Paige Dearth, When Smiles Fade
I am often asked whether physical aggression by women toward men, such as a slap in the face, is abuse. The answer is: “It depends.” Men typically experience women’s shoves or slaps as annoying and infuriating rather than intimidating, so the long-term emotional effects are less damaging. It is rare to find a man who has gradually lost his freedom or self-esteem because of a woman’s aggressiveness.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
Dear Mrs. Black: On seven prior occasions this company has denied your claim in writing. We now deny it for the eighth and final time. You must be stupid, stupid stupid, stupid!
— John Grisham
I wonder where love really is. Good feelings. Happiness. They're someplace, I know. I feel that. But without Father and Mother, how do I get there?
— Susan Shaw, The Boy From the Basement
Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33TAT: No. I don't know anymore than you know they're not. But, I'm talking about boundaries and privacy here. As a therapist working with survivors, I have been harassed by people who claim to be affiliated with the false memory movement. Parents and other family members have called or written me insisting on talking with me about my patients' cases, despite my clearly indicating I can't because of professional confidentiality. I have had other parents and family members investigate me -- look into my professional background -- hoping to find something to discredit me to the patients I was seeing at the time because they disputed their memories. This isn't the kind of sober, scientific discourse you all claim you want.
— David L. Calof