Quotes about Progress

The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.

They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was 'Apollo' really about?

These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

Dear Friend, Just a line to show that I am alive & kicking and going grand. It's a treat.

With an ambassador, you're supposed to put your best foot forward, and we've been sending mainly crap to space for forty years.

In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.

I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam.

The tragedy of the human species is it has evolved the capacity of foresight, but refuses to use it.

Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves.