The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
Yet an ugliness often lurked beneath the reformist zeal of Progressivism. Many Progressives – who tended to be middle-class white Protestants – held deep prejudices against immigrants and blacks and were so convinced of their own virtuous authority that they disdained democratic procedures.
To be wicked does not insure prosperity – for the inn did not succeed well.[Il ne suffit pas d’être méchant pour prospérer. La gargote allait mal.]
The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard. You are at the same moment furiously pressing forward and desperately holding back. It is as though a London stockbroker should go to his office in a suit of chain mail and insist on talking medieval Latin. So in the last analysis the champion of progress is also the champion of anachronisms.
The logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.
The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.
The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.
Progress just means bad things happen faster.
In the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.
In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas — and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed.
