Belief in Progress Quotes

I always have been optimistic about humanity's future. Always. Even at the most dismaying of times.

Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.

Writing... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.

Do not disregard the accumulation of goodness, saying, 'This will come to nothing.' By the gradual falling of raindrops, a jar is filled.

What is surprising is that their ideological opponents, the Marxists - the anti-liberals, the representatives of the oppressed working classes - believed in progress with at least as much passion as the liberals.

Our choice is between cynicism and hope.

One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.

The hope is what America represents to the world and has always represented - the hope for a better life and a better world. We have a duty to protect and support that hope with not just our words, but with our deeds.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.

One of the most powerful forces in human nature is our belief that change is possible.

Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.

We didn't grow up with the sense that where we were was where we were gonna be. We grew up with the sense that where we were almost didn't matter, because we will be becoming something greater.

It is hope that maintains most of mankind.

The doing of something productive regardless of the outcome is an act of faith. The doing of a small something when a large something is too much for us is perhaps especially an act of faith. Faith means going forward by whatever means we can.

I've often wondered about the shyness of some of us in the West about standing for these ideals that have done so much to ease the plight of man and the hardships of our imperfect world. Let us be shy no longer. Let us go to our strength. Let us offer hope. Let us tell the world that a new age is not only possible, but probable.

The 'American dream' ... means an economy in which people who work hard can get ahead and each new generation lives better than the last one. The 'American dream' also means a democratic political system in which most people feel they can affect public decisions and elect officials who will speak for them. In recent years, the dream has been fading.

So don't get cynical. Cynicism didn't put a man on the moon. Cynicism has never won a war, or cured a disease, or built a business, or fed a young mind. Cynicism is a choice. And hope will always be a better choice.

It is possible to believe in progress as a fact without believing in progress as an ethical principle; but in the catechism of many Americans, the one goes with the other.

It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm.

I have a lot of faith in us. I have a lot of faith in humanity. It's based, though, on my own life; I've come too far to be a pessimist.

Even our smallest attempts are not in vain. We know that nothing is lost.

Now, as never before, hundreds of millions of men and women-who had formerly believed that stoic resignation in the face of hunger and disease and darkness was the best one could could do-have come alive with a new sense that the means are at hand with which to make for themselves a better life.

'Time's noblest offspring is the last.' This line of Bishop Berkeley's expresses the real cause of the belief in progress in the animal creation.

I think that every moment you succumb to cynicism, you're taking energy away from change.

I am the eternal optimist. I think that, over time, people respond to civility and -- and rational argument.