Our planet has not seen an extinction crisis as serious as the one in progress for 65 million years.
Therefore, what you do as a spiritual practitioner in this life shapes that. To seek and find this beautiful, continuing existence, where there can be more progress towards Buddha-hood, toward love, and wisdom, and helping all being etc. So that's the great value of it.
Only by our positive thinking, by our bringing the positive qualities of others to the fore, will this world be able to make progress.
The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
. . . there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.
If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.
You must ask, "What do we mean by great results?" Your goals don't have to be quantifiable, but they do have to be describable. Some leaders try to insist, "The only acceptable goals are measurable," but that's actually an undisciplined statement. Lots of goals-beauty, quality, life change, love-are worthy but not quantifiable. But you do have to be able to tell if you're making progress.
We have our arts, the ancients had theirs. . . We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.
Benchmarks, yes, we want the Iraqi government to do the things that will show progress. But to say, American troops are going to leave, no matter what's happening on the ground, is surrender. There is no other word for it.
Talks on art are almost useless. The work which goes to bring progress in one's own subject is sufficient compensation for the incomprehension of imbeciles.
The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benevolence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.
I think that as a society as well, we need to be smart about what technologies we take up and how construe progress.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. . . . 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.
You cannot make progress with excuses.
Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
It is the business of future to be dangerous. . . . The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
But even more: all at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.
The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved.
The real spiritual progress of the aspirant is measured by the extent to which he achieves inner tranquility.
To conquer by sheer force is becoming harder and harder every day. Defensive is getting continuously the advantage of offensive, as we progress in the satanic science of destruction.