One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.
—Karl A. Menninger
If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed progress.… Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn't happen by laws of nature. And it doesn't happen by social laws.… It happens as a result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at them, with no guarantee of success—in fact, with a need for a rather high tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments.
—Noam Chomsky
It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women—a new job, a new town, a divorce—which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal, or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves.
—Nadine Gordimer
An environmental setting developed over millions of years must be considered to have some merit. Anything so complicated as a planet, inhabited by more than a million and a half species of plants and animals, all of them living together in a more or less balanced equilibrium in which they continually use and reuse the same molecules of the soil and air, cannot be improved by aimless and uninformed tinkering.
—E. F. Schumacher
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence and back into bondage.
—Fraser Tyler
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority.… All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.
—H. L. Mencken
He who limps is still walking.
—Stanislaw J. Lec
The wheels of justice… they're square wheels.
—Barbara Corcoran
The thing you are ripening toward is the fruit of your life. It will make you bright inside, no matter what you are outside. It is a shining thing.
—Stewart Edward White
What we call 'Progress' is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
—Havelock Ellis
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
—Edward Gibbon
All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
—Ellen Glasgow
The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.
—Barbara Hall
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.
—George Bernard Shaw
The advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.
—Ogden Nash