Quotes on Improvement and Progress
Opinionated quotations from the famous and not-so-famous.

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

I'm always willing to accept change, just as long as it isn't change for the sake of change. If that change will result in a better way of doing things, then I'm all for it.

James K. Van Fleet

The rich adopt novelties and become accustomed to their use. This sets a fashion which others imitate. Once the richer classes have adopted a certain way of living, producers have an incentive to improve the methods of manufacture so that soon it is possible for the poorer classes to follow suit. Thus luxury furthers progress. Luxury is the roadmaker of progress: it develops latent needs and makes people discontented. In so far as they think consistently, moralists who condemn luxury must recommend the comparatively desireless existence of the wild life roaming in the woods as the ultimate ideal of civilized life.

Ludwig von Mises

Play with fire, you might get burned, but eliminate fire and you might never feel its warmth and you might never revel in its illumination.

'Justice Earl Clayton' (Robert Loggia) from The Outer Limits TV series - Episode: Final Appeal (Part 1)

There is no way to make people like change. You can only make them feel less threatened by it.

Frederick Hayes

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

Henry Miller

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Adlai Stevenson

Discoveries are often made by not following instructions, by going off the main road, by trying the untried.

Frank Tyger

It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.

Tony Benn

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clark

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

Time advances: facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain, and penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

But for the silly chaps, we would still be living in the Stone Age.

Sir Christopher Cockerell

All change is not growth; as all movement is not forward.

Ellen Glasgow

We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature.... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics--back to the jungle.

Max Frisch

Where we cannot invent, we may at least improve.

Charles Caleb Colton

There are men so conservative they believe nothing should be done for the first time.

Unknown

We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.

Frances E. Willard

It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.

Mignon McLaughlin

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.

Bacon

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