Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
You won’t realize the distance you’ve walked until you take a look around and realize how far you’ve been.
If it wasn’t for the Enlightenment, you wouldn’t be reading this right now. You’d be standing in a smock throwing turnips at a witch.
I may not be where I want to be, But thank God I’m not where I used to be.
I walk. I talk. I shop, I sneeze. I’m gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. There’s trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don’t sleep on a bed of bones.
TV: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Man [has] always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reason.
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
My point is, this is America. You start out with hand jobs and progress to orgies. You smoke some dope and then, the big H. This is our whole culture of bigger, better, stronger, faster. The key word is progress.
In America, if your addiction isn’t always new and improved, you’re a failure.
In America, if your addiction isn’t always new and improved, you’re a failure.
Book: “Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk, pg 203
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.