Illusion Of Progress Quotes

#1. [Flaubert] didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

Julian Barnes

#2. Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.

Alberto Manguel

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

George Orwell

#4. I believe there should be no arbitrary date set for withdrawal and yet no permanent, unending deployment. No cut and run, yet measured progress in helping a people who want to be free without an illusion of overnight success.

Rick Renzi

#5. The experience of the Mayas is one more reminder that any interpretation of human evolution based on the idea of unilineal progress forwards (or upwards) is an illusion. Peoples decline as well as rise.

Hugh Thomas

#6. The greatest enemy of progress is the illusion of knowledge.

John Young

#7. After you've seen behind the facade of a stage set you can't take the play seriously any more. You can't go backwards and regain your ignorance; you have to move forward.

Zeena Schreck

#8. If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

Hannah Arendt

#9. Shallow intellect is worse than ignorance. Ignorance can be treated with knowledge, but shallow intellect, that is illusion of knowledge, is untreatable and quite dangerous to the progress and wellbeing of humanity.

Abhijit Naskar

#10. The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and - instead of giving up - you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling - be it an illusion or not - that something new has opened up.

Alberto Giacometti

#11. The essential lesson of the zoetrope is this: movement, indeed all progress, even the passage of time, is an illusion. Life is the repetition of stillness.

Josiah Bancroft

#12. No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

Sigmund Freud

#13. Space-the illusion that one is getting somewhere.

Marty Rubin