progress

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation...want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

Progress may have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. 

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. 

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. 

"Sometimes we respond foolishly before we respond sensibly. We've experienced terrorism, negativism and man's inhumanity to one another before, and yet today we're a better people because of how we respond to it. The evolutionary process moves one step foreword, then two back; then three foreword and two back; then three foreword and only one step back, so that in the end there is a positive process."

We had a rule in Tibet that anyone proposing a new invention had to guarentee that it was beneficial, or at least harmless, for seven generations of humans before it could be adopted.

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind.  Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul.  It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul.  We are being urged from everyside to become efficient rather than intimate.

Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him.