#ogres

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#elements #healthy #life #necessary #order

My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library. ↗

— Peter Golkin

#bicycles #bike #bikes #conservation #favorite

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#knowledge #life #progress #reason #faith

Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create. ↗

— John Galsworthy

#men

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! ("Jane Brown's Body") ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#medicine #progress #science #death

I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#progress #nature

Respect is the lifeblood of progress, and the safe harbor of humanity's great aspirations. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#progress #respect #respect

What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together ↗

— Julian Barnes

#progress #science #stupidity #science

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. ↗

— Henry Ford

#progress

Hello, Professor McGonagall,” said Moody calmly, bouncing the ferret still higher. “What — what are you doing?” said Professor McGonagall, her eyes following the bouncing ferret’s progress through the air. “Teaching,” said Moody. “Teach — Moody, is that a student?” shrieked Professor McGonagall, the books spilling out of her arms. “Yep,” said Moody. “Moody, we never use Transfiguration as a punishment!” said Professor McGonagall weakly. ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#goblet-of-fire #harry-potter #j-k-rowling #mcgonagall #moody