Quotes about Progress

Some day, we shall stop and build a house, when we shall have gone far enough. But we do not have to hasten. The days before us are without end, like the forest.

Times change, and people change with the times—the wise ones do. Wisdom lies in knowing when to remember and when to forget. Consistency is not a habit of mind which it is wise to practice or to expect of the human race.

From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.

To say that that which was true in the 17th century cannot possibly be true today, because we travel in jet planes while they traveled in horse carts—is like saying that modern men do not need food, as men did in the past, because they are wearing trenchcoats and slacks, instead-of powdered wigs and hoop skirts.

What kind of 'changing world', Alvah? Changing to what? From what? Who's doing the changing?

There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

You know, sometimes I'll go to an 8th-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it's just 8th grade ... An 8th-grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!

It [is] that courage that Africa most desperately needs.

At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life-- what you look like,where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home--none of that is an excuse... where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No ones written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write you own destiny.You make your own future.

Don't let your failures define you.

Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.

The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.