Progress - christiansquoting.org.uk

Do you know what the largest room in the world is? The room for improvement.

As of 1945 -- the year in which more people were killed violently, more buildings destroyed, more homes burned than any other year in history -- World Wars 1 and 2 had made a mockery of the nineteenth-century idea of progress, the notion that things were getting better and would continue to do so.-- Stephen E. Ambrose, "Citizen Soldiers

If you don't like my opinion of you, you can always improve - BRILLIANT, ASHLEIGH (1933-)

I am afraid I believe we delude ourselves if we think that humanity is becoming ever more civilised, ever more sophisticated and ever more reasonable. It's simply not the case. --Charles, Prince of Wales

It is necessary to try to surpass oneself always; this occupation ought to last as long as life. -- Christina, Queen of Sweden

If there is no struggle there is no progress. -- Frederick Douglass

Exactly a week before the final treaty with England was signed, Franklin saw Paris's first balloon ascension at the Champ-de-Mars... What good, some skeptic asked, could a balloon be? What good, Franklin replied, was a new-born baby? "Benjamin Franklin" by Carl van Doren

The progress of mankind has always depended upon those who, seemingly isolated and powerless in their own day, have seen their vision and remained true to it. In the darkening corridors of time, they preserved integral their vision of the daylight at the end. This is a matter not of calculation but of faith. Our work may be small and its results invisible to us. But we may rest assured it will come to fruition in God's good time.- John Ferguson, The Enthronement of Love

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance. -- Edward Gibbon

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. Andre Gide

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork? Stanislaw J. Lec, UnkemptThoughts (1962

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn, and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. C.S. Lewis

I will go anywhere, provided it is forward. David Livingstone

Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is advancing. - Giuseppe Mazzini (1805 &endash; 1872)

Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands. -- H.L. Mencken

Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress ... Alfred A. Montapert

"Why is there not national like individual progression? Does it not seem as if the greatest amount of progress would be secured by the *same* nation continuing to carry its own on, and profiting by its own experience? It cannot be a law that all nations shall fall after a certain number of years. God does not work in that sort of way: they must have broken some law of nature which has caused them to fall. But are all nations to sink in that way? As if national soil, like the soil of the earth, must lie fallow after a certain number of crops. And will England turn into Picts again, after a certain number of harvest years, as Egypt has turned into Arabs? Or will a nation find out at last the laws of God by which she may make a steady progression? -- Florence Nightingale, 1850

The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. It has become fashionable today to say that, for better or worse, we live in "the post-Christian age." Certainly the forms of our thinking and language have largely ceased to be Christian, but to my eye the substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past. Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco-Roman antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo-Christian teleology. The fact that Communists share it merely helps to show what can be demonstrated on many other grounds: that Marxism, like Islam, is a Judeo-Christian heresy. We continue today to live, as we have lived for about 1,700 years, very largely in a context of Christian axioms.- F A Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the 20th Century,

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.-- Snoopy

When I was a child,
I thought as a child
I spoke as a child
I didn't know better
But now I'm a man
I look like a man
I'm old as a man
And I should know better...
Todd Rundgren (1948 - )

Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is? Frank Scully

Stop this Progress! --Theotocopulos in the H. G. Wells movie _Things to Come_