Progressive Thinking Quotes

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

We were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past, rather like the vorticists did at the beginning of the century in the Britain or the dadaists did Europe, you know. It was the same sensibility of everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful.

There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.

I will adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Talking Heads were a big influence on my comedy. For David Byrne, every album had to be different. With 'Portlandia,' every season has to be different. You gotta reinvent the look, all of it.

[Addressing Thomas Jefferson:] Your taste is judicious in liking better the dreams of the future than the history of the past.

Ideals survive through change. They die through inertia in the face of challenge.

When people ask me if I'm liberal or conservative, I say, 'Yeah.' I'm both of them. To be a liberal means to be open-minded and generous and open to new ideas. And to be conservative means to hold onto things that are important, things that shouldn't be cast aside.

The young people are the most active and vital force in society. They are the most eager to learn and the least conservative in their thinking. This is especially so in the era of socialism.

Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.

It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards.

I don't think a system or a government should fear critical opinions or views. Only by heeding those critical views would it be possible for us to further improve our work and make further progress.

Let a hundred flowers blossom and let one hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.

I never stop making sure that what I say is the best of what could be said about a particular thing. It's a constant evolution. If I planted a tree one way yesterday, and somebody tells me of a better way to plant a tree, I think, 'You know, they're right, that's better.' Then I change my way to accommodate the new way of planting trees.

Public opinion is always in advance of the law.

A liberal is a person who kept an open mind … a person who did not always look backward but would look forward to new possible solutions.

The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.

I hope progressive ways of thinking will permeate the "mainstream" more and more in the coming years. Goddess knows we have endured a very long spell (thirty plus years) of regressive thinking and hyper conservativism dominating our culture and national discourse. It necessitates risk taking and rule breaking by people in all walks of life to swing that pendulum back though.

My mother is a very liberal wife and mother, so there was no peer pressure to marry.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.

Artists are, I think in general, compassionate people, and part of what makes us artists is that we're open-minded people, and I think we're almost, by definition, progressive in a lot of ways.

We cannot continue doing the same thing and expect different results

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.