progress on Screens

If there is one word that sums up how many of us feel about technology and family life, it’s Help! Parents know we need help.  We love the way devices make our lives easier amid the stress and busy...

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

If we see more and further than they, it is not because of our own clear eyes or tall bodies, but because we are raised on high by their gigantic stature.

People say there's delays on flights. Delays? Really? New York to California in five hours. That used to take 30 years, and a bunch of you would die on the way there, and have a baby. You'd be...

To reach a port we must set sail – Sail, not tie at anchor Sail, not drift.

“We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.”

Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus (He who ceases to be better ceases to be good)

“Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial...

Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them as from a root.

It is not strange... to mistake change for progress.

Don't take the fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.”

Never mistake motion for action.

With vainglory, we crave notice of our achievements with pride, we take full credit for the progress we have made and do not think that God has been involved at all, let alone been our indispensible h...

There is no way out, only a way forward.

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

Yet despite all of these advancements, we are more discontent than ever. Gregg Easterbrook wrote a book on this very topic entitled The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. ...

"Progress is not accomplished in one stage."

The life of people on earth is obviously better now than it has ever been—certainly much better than it was 500 years ago when people beat each other with cats. This may sound silly but now and then w...

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress. There is something in us that is no...

The modern world has had far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn...

If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.

My mentor is José Rojas. He was a spiritual adviser for two US presidents. On one of our first phone conversations, he said to me, “What if you’ll actually get to where you want to be quicker by slowi...

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The animal behavior scientist Temple Grandin, who achieved significant success while struggling with autism, has this to say on the subject of progress: People are always looking for the single ma...

“If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light," Ma considered. "We didn't lack for light when I was a girl before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of." "Th...