Quotes about Progress

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the current popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old habits for new and less harmful ones.

We haven't any use for old things here." "Even when they're beautiful?" "Particularly when they're beautiful. Beauty's attractive, and we don't want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones." "But the new ones are so stupid and horrible.

Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they ahd been made for man, not as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.

But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state—will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end . . .

But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.

We haven't any use for old things here." "Even when they're beautiful?" "Particularly when they're beautiful.

What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you'd have a reason for self-denial.' 'But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.

Science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.

But God doesn't change.' 'Men do though.