Quotes about Progress

I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.

But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven't also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us — white and Black — when it is key to our survival as a movement?

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky. These rocks, he thought, are waiting for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.

There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man's rational faculty—the power of ideas.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

The position of an art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man's progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation (or, today, his retrogression) in the humanities.

Begin now to be what you will be hereafter.

Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is best.

A tendency that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. You're a transition person — a link between past and future. And your own change can affect many, many lives downstream.

I must change in order to change the world. The only revolution with any permanent value takes part in the breast of the individual person.

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them - Einstein