Quotes about Progress

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times.

So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.

It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue (German) ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example. It is still clinging to one or two things which were useful once, but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental.

It isn't as it used to be in the old times. Then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else. 'Now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don't drink.

Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of delays on account of the weather. Nothing breaks up an author's progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather. Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.

All men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time.

We were building several lines of railway, and our line from Camelot to London was already finished and in operation.

We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.