#progress

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. ↗

— William Blake

#energy #existence #hate #human #human existence

We (the left) have to be used to being a minority – a small minority- for some time to come. The odd thing is that the right even when it is in power, likes to think of itself as an embattled minority against this elite that somehow runs everything. Whereas the left, even when it has no power at all, likes to imagine it somehow represents the majority of people. These are mirror -image delusions. It is important to stick to principles, even when some of them may be unpopular now for one reason or another. For example, there has been a tendency for some progressives to look at the power of the right, and say, “Well, all we can focus on is economic justice issues, because other things, whether they are abortion rights or drug law reform, will be less popular and more divisive”. And I think that is wrong approach. There are certain core things we stand for, and these include both economic justice and civil liberties, which you can’t back away from. ↗

— Barbara Ehrenreich

#imagination

A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me. ↗

— Ramsay Burt

#ballet #dance #experimental #gender #progressive

We can continue our progress as a Nation toward the promise that all people are created equal and that our Nation will treat every person in that spirit. ↗

— Bobby Scott

#created #equal #every #nation #our

We've forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We've ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore. (“The Thing”) ↗

— Richard Matheson

#aspiration #progress #life

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward. ↗

— Robert M. Pirsig

#morality #progress #life

The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning. The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#fiction #fictional #life #meaning #pattern

Children...need most of the same things adults need--consideration, respect for their work, the knowledge that they and the things they do are taken seriously. ↗

— Caroline Pratt

#education #progressive-education #education

Progressivism is a spectrum; it’s not an ideology following one leader saying one thing. It’s many people who have very wildly diverging opinions about many things. But, as progressives, if we could commit to a general frame of reference that we are about improving the quality of life for a lot more people, we’re about helping working and middle-class people, and we’re about taking care of poor people, we could really make some inroads in political power in this country. But, if we choose to be purists, if we choose to be arguing for a consensus we will never reach, for agreement on every point, it’s never going to happen. ↗

— Urvashi Vaid

#life

It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum. ↗

— Jon Krakauer

#culture #culture-and-imperialism #modernity #progress #sherpas