Retrogression Quotes

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

... the problem isn't that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France, before the revolution. And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won't last.

At 20 years old, I was better at playing with toys than I was as a kid.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

I feel like I'm part of a generation of people who are stuck in the past and are really self-absorbed. I mean, we're actually taking pictures of ourselves and posting them on Facebook, and keeping in touch with people that should have been out of our lives 15 years ago.

The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.

Revolutions never go backward.

… we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Some people would like the world to go back to the 1950s.

It is a retrogression when human beings begin to insist on uniform, on one-mindedness, on conditioning their offspring so that all their reactions are automatic.

When you start to think of revenge, you start to think of hate. I don't believe in hating people. It's a retrogressive thing.

I think progress began to retrogress when Wilbur and Orville started tinkering around in Dayton and at Kitty Hawk, because I believe that two Wrights made a wrong.

Reform can only move forward. It cannot stagnate. Even more so, it can’t move backward.

Our act started at the bottom and went downhill.

Going forward seems like retreat.

If you stand still there is only one way to go, and that's backwards.

I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.

I feel like I'm going backwards, actually, as I get older. I'm regressing. I feel more and more like a kid, which is kind of a fun feeling.

Honestly, I feel like I spent the last 10 years just trying to work, just get my hands on the best material I could. I'd like to say that it was quite calculated and genius, my ability to take one step forward and two steps back.

My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.

We have embraced the 21st century by entering such cutting-edge industries as brick, carpet, insulation and paint. Try to control your excitement.

I mean there's a college kid left in everyone. I bet you, too, if you could go back you would for a night or two, so why not? My brother's still in college, my little brother, so it's always good to go back and get a little glimpse of it and to hang out with him for a weekend or two.

I practice going backward all the time.

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.