progress

When you look back at that relationship you didn't think you could live without and realize had you stayed in it, you'd be some comfortable loser, sitting on the couch with another comfortable loser, instead of being the dope motherfucker you are today.

Without trust there's no cooperation. And without cooperation there's no progress. History stops.

Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests

Even so, I think historians have more to offer than perspective on our present woes. The foreign country we call the past also lets us look beyond the horizons of what is, to see what could be.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn__ absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

Thousands, if not millions, of people had exchanged life for the negation of life simply so that someone like me could have the pleasure of riding in a taxi. And now thousands more were throwing away their lives in order to try and eliminate global suffering, and they didn't see the senselessness of that, though it screamed out from every page of history and from every street-corner; in the scream you could hear the universal lack of order and lack of satisfaction and all the other shortcomings which were in fact the very essence of life - remove them, do away with them, and what would be left?

In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.

Now that science has helped us to overcome the awe of the unknown in nature, we are the slaves of social pressures of our own making. When called upon to act independently, we cry for patterns, systems, and authorities. If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate--in short, the emancipation from fear--then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.

We should use our imagination more than our memory.

I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

I outwitted those that deliberately suppressed me not by retaliating, but by minding my own business, continuing the self-discovery journey and reinventing myself.

These days we have Smartphones, Smartcars, Smartboards, Smarteverything, but consider this: if technology is getting smarter, does that mean humans are getting dumber?

There is no progress (spiritual) in this world like the one that comes from being cheated knowingly. This is a very high principle.

If you met the robbers and they robbed you, you should not cry. Think 'how will I go on [do progress] now?' You will get all the help you need. What does one gain by crying 'what will become of me?' Who is the one suffering, the robber or the one who was robbed? The fault is of the sufferer.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Art is the medium through which new thoughts, perspectives, and attitudes are brought into the world.

Conformity to the present is invisibility to the future.