Progress Paradox Quotes

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.

Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.

Tomorrow country then, tomorrow country now.

Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

To develop or not to develop, that is the question.

We progress by leaps and bounds technologically, medically - we can live longer, we can... but you know, in the year 1230, they knew as much as we know now about the human heart.