3 years ago in Quotes
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Tagsprogress
 8 years ago in Quotes
Google's answer is, wake up, grandpa, this is the new normal. But all they're doing is trying to port a bug in the Internet over to the real world, and calling it progress.

You can dress up a bug and call it a feature. You can also put dog crap in the freezer and call it ice cream. But people can taste the difference.
Tagsprogress
 9 years ago in Quotes
Progress materializes despite and in contradistinction to the herd-like human spirit – not because of it.
Tagsprogress
 9 years ago in Quotes
You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
Tagsprogress
 9 years ago in Quotes
The world gets improved in fits and starts, in small ways more than in large ones, and thanks to the unseen, unthought infrastructures that undergird it more than the civic or scientific or artistic victories we celebrate in the streets or in the theaters.
Tagsprogress
 10 years ago in Quotes
Ah, yeah. We're gonna go to Mars. And then of course we're gonna colonize deep space. With our microwave hot dogs and plastic vomit, fake dog shit and cinnamon dental floss, lemon-scented toilet paper and sneakers with lights in the heels. And all these other impressive things we've done down here. But let me ask you this: what are we gonna tell the intergalactic council of ministers the first time one of our teenage mothers throws their newborn baby into a dumpster? How are we gonna explain that to the space people? How are we gonna let them know that our ambassador was only late for the meeting because his breakfast was cold and he had to spend half an hour punching his wife around the kitchen? And what are they gonna think when they find out, its just a local custom, that over 80 million women in the Third world have had their clitorises forcibly removed in order to reduce their sexual pleasure so they won't cheat on their husbands? Can't you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up?
"Complaints and Grievances"
 1 decade ago in Quotes
Where could we be now if we hadn’t repressed half of our society throughout our entire history?
 1 decade ago in Quotes
Your neighbors may shit in their pool. They may not even be aware that they’re doing it. They might think shit is just a natural consequence of having a pool. They may hop the fence at night and shit in your pool, oblivious as they are to the difference between shit and not-shit. That doesn’t mean you give up and start shitting in your pool, too. You clean it up (even though it’s not your mess) and you go back to enjoying swimming in a nice sanitary place where poops don’t hit you in the face when you come up from underwater. You invite your friends over, because swimming in a nice clean pool is more fun for everyone, and it’s more fun for you if you’re not swimming alone. As a result, if your friends decide to dig pools in their backyards, they know shit and pools are not irrevocably linked and they work to keep theirs clean. Slowly, you all hope, everyone will see how much nicer that makes swimming.
 1 decade ago in Quotes
Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.
letter to Heinrich Zaggler, December 6, 1917
 1 decade ago in Quotes
The reason we don't live in a dungeon is because people have joined together to change things.
 1 decade ago in Quotes
Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.
 1 decade ago in Quotes
Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage have developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped.
"Nineteen-Eightyfour"
 1 decade ago in Quotes
No movement can survive unless it is constantly growing and changing with the times. If it isn’t growing, it’s stagnant, and without the support of the people, no movement for liberation can exist, no matter how correct its analysis of the situation is.
Tagsprogress
 1 decade ago in Quotes
War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
Tagsprogress war
 1 decade ago in Quotes
You can not, without guilt and disgrace, stop where you are. The past and the present call on you to advance. Let what you have gained be an impulse to something higher. Your nature is too great to be crushed. You were not created what you are, merely to toil, eat, drink, and sleep, like the inferior animals. If you will, you can rise.
Tagsprogress
 1 decade ago in Quotes
Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.
The Third Notebook, December 4, 1917
Tagsprogress
 1 decade ago in Quotes
I used to yell at lusers when they didn't RTFM.
Then I yelled at developers because they didn't WTFM.
Now I yell into the abyss as all of you fucking dipshits gallivant around naked, singing the praises of a fucking number for the number's sake.
Tagsprogress
 1 decade ago in Quotes
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
 1 decade ago in Quotes
Whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery.
"Existentialism Is a Humanism" (1946)