Progress - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

The Count merely said that Great Movements were awfully common things in his day, and as for Progress, it was at one time quite a nuisance, but it never progressed.

- Edgar Allan Poe, ''SomeWords with a Mummy,'' revised (1845)

He, I know - for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made - thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must invariably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank - is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

- H. G.Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention (1895)

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.

- H. G.Wells, The Discovery of the Future (1902)

What will not be forgotten, and what will and should continue to obsess our imaginations, is this revelation of the possibilities of the universe, this destruction of our ignorant self-complacency, and this demonstration of how narrow is the path of our material existence, and what abysses may lie upon either side of it. Solemnity and humility are at the base of all our emotions to-day. May they be the foundations upon which a more earnest and reverent race may build a more worthy temple.

- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt (1913)

They had early observed the value of certain improvements, had easily inferred that there was room for more, and took the greatest pains to develop two kinds of minds - the critic and inventor. Those who showed an early tendency to observe, to discriminate, to suggest, were given special training for that function; and some of their highest officials spent their time in the most careful study of one or another branch of work, with a view to its further improvement.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)

Everything in human society is being continually perfected - and should be.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.

- Charles Fort, Lo! (1931)

We must move with the times, you know, even at Shangri-La.

- James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933)

Raymond Passworthy: Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest? Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man - too much, and too soon - and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning. Passworthy: But . . . we're such little creatures. Poor humanity's so fragile, so weak. Little . . . little animals. Cabal: Little animals. If we're no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe, or nothingness.Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?

- H. G.Wells, Things to Come (film, 1936)

They were men who built the city; they were not gods or demons. They were men. I remember the dead man's face. They were men who were here before us.We must build again.

- Stephen Vincent Benйt, ''By theWaters of Babylon'' (1937)

It reminded him of other days, when weather was something to be experienced rather than to be planned. Life had lost some of its flavor, in his estimation, when the weather engineers had finally harnessed the elements.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Methuselah's Children (1941)

Speed, is that progress? Anyway, why progress? Why not enjoy what one has? Men have never exhausted present pleasures.

- Austin TappanWright, Islandia (1942)

Only the fittest should survive. Differential breeding. How else can we have a better race, eh? Progress is built on death.

- Katherine MacLean, ''The Fittest'' (1951)

I shall not shape humanity's future. I do not even imagine it. It is so rich in possibilities and potentialities that it is, strictly speaking, unimaginable.

- Margaret St. Clair, Agent of the Unknown (1952)

I thought of the distant future and the things we'd have, and discounted my wildest guesses as inadequate. Immortality? Achieved in the nineteenth millennium X. R. and discarded in the twenty-third because it was no longer necessary. Reverse entropy to rewind the universe? Obsolete with the discovery of nolanism and the concurrent cognate in the quadrate decal. Sounds wild? How would the word quantum or the concept of a matterenergy transformation sound to a Neanderthaler? We're Neanderthalers, to our descendants of a hundred thousand years from now. You'll sell them short to make the wildest guess as to what they'll do and what they'll be. The stars? Hell, yes. They'll have the stars.

- Fredric Brown, The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953)

People don't really want change, any change at all - and xenophobia is very deep-rooted. But we progress, as we must - if we are to go out to the stars.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star (1956)

Between 1800 and 1900 the doctrine of Pie in the Sky gave place, in a majority of Western minds, to the doctrine of Pie on the Earth. The motivating and compensatory Future came to be regarded, not as a state of disembodied happiness, to be enjoyed by me and my friends after death, but as a condition of terrestrial well-being for my children or (if that seemed a bit too optimistic) my grandchildren, or maybe my great-grandchildren.

- Aldous Huxley, ''Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow'' (1956)

Why is it always - always - so costly for man to move from the present to the future?

- Robert CreightonWilliams and Christopher Knopf, 20 Million Miles to Earth (film, 1957)

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules - and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan (1959)

Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough.

- Arthur C. Clarke, ''Hazards of Prophecy: An Arresting Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible: Failures of Nerve and Failures of Imagination'' (1962)

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.

- Frederik Pohl, ''Day Million'' (1966)

Faced with the challenge of the endless universe, Man will be forced to mature further, just as the Neanderthal - faced with an entire planet - had no choice but to grow away from the tradition of savagery.

- Dean Koontz, ''That Moon Plaque: Comments by Science Fiction Writers'' (1969)

So long as man can see himself as a destructive, aggressive creature, who in the killing of his fellow beings can be compared only with mice, and so long as there are countries in this world where his opinion can be discussed and voiced freely, there is still hope that mankind will overcome in its pursuit of the far stars.

- Josef Nesvadba, ''That Moon Plaque: Comments by Science Fiction Writers'' (1969)

A capsule description of most human ''progress'': By the time you learn how, it's too late.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

Little mirrors were affixed to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Direction of the Road'' (1973)

We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that's better.

- John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider (1975)

People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?

- Harlan Ellison, ''Jeffty Is Five'' (1977)

Progress is a tension between the notion of perfection and the notion that striving, not finding, is important.

- George Zebrowski, Macrolife (1979)

Her grandparents, believers in progress, had always told her things were better now. Human minds had been darker when people couldn't read late at night, their prejudices greater when they had lacked television's images of other places, their work harder without the appliances many took for granted. Nina was not so sure; technical civilization had isolated people from the basics of life, and had fooled them into believing that they controlled the world.

- Pamela Sargent, ''The Old Darkness'' (1983)

The present tumult in our world is the natural and understandable result of a vigorous intelligence moving out of the savagery of our life form's childhood. Instead of humanity's demise, our era seems to be filled with evidence that we were meant to survive and evolve much further.

- Gene Roddenberry, ''A Letter to the Next Generation'' (1988)

The Tezumen had realised long ago that everything was steadily getting worse and, having a terrible literal-mindedness, had developed a complex system to keep track of how much worse each succeeding day was.

- Terry Pratchett, Eric (1990)

''Will the world be a better place?'' Jason asked. Prometheus shook his head. ''I doubt it,'' he said. ''It always amazes me, the way the old place quickly gets back to normal no matter what you do to try and improve it. No, you can make it worse, no problem, but it's virtually impossible to improve it. I tried, remember. I gave them fire, and yet millions of people are still cold. I taught them agriculture, and millions of them are still starving. I gave them laughter, and yet the majority of them are still as miserable as income tax. I can only imagine it's how they like it, deep down.''

- Tom Holt, Ye Gods! (1992)

Among all the many things we transform on Mars, ourselves and our social reality should be among them.We must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

Terraforming is an ancient profession. Making your world more habitable began on the Earth itself, with the first dancing fire that warmed its builder's cave; and everything since - every green world and asteroid and comet - is an enlargement on that first cozy cave.

- Robert Reed, ''A Place with Shade'' (1995)

''I'm sure we can pull together, sir.'' Lord Vetinari raised his eyebrows. ''Oh, I do hope not, I really do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.'' He smiled. ''It's the only way to make progress.''

- Terry Pratchett, The Truth (2000)