"So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

"Things that have a common quality ever quickly seek their kind."

"The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say."

"The day of large profits is probably past. There may be room for further intensive, but not extensive, development of industry in the present area of civilization."

"Uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality."

"Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives."

"To understand the true quality of people, you must look into their minds, and examine their pursuits and aversions."

"The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place. Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilisation of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to remove national and provincial antipathies, and to bind together all the branches of the great human family."

"Expositions are the timekeepers of progress."

"Next came the Patent laws. These began in England in 1624; and, in this country, with the adoption of our constitution. Before then [these?], any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things."

"Two conditions render difficult this historic situation of mankind: It is full of tremendously deadly armament, and it has not progressed morally as much as it has scientifically and technically."

"The advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end."

"According to the ancient Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step"."

"I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."

"I walk slowly, but I never walk backward."

"When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders."

"The stone that is rolling, can gather no moss."

"If you strike a thorn or rose, Keep a-goin'! If it hails or if it snows, Keep a-goin'! 'Tain't no use to sit and whine 'Cause the fish ain't on your line; Bait you hook an' keep on tryin', Keep a-goin'!"

"Qui n'a pas l'esprit de son âge, De son âge a tout le malheur."

"Press on!—"for in the grave there is no work And no device"—Press on! while yet ye may!"

"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end,… We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

"The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved."

"L'esprit humain fait progrès toujours, mais c'est progrès en spirale."

""Spiral" the memorable Lady terms Our mind's ascent."

"That in our proper motion we ascend Up to our native seat; descent and fall To us is adverse."

"New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth."

"Quod sequitur, fugio; quod fugit, usque sequor."

"To look up and not down, To look forward and not back, To look out and not in—and To lend a hand."

"I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before."

"Vogue la galère."

"From lower to the higher next, Not to the top, is Nature's text; And embryo good, to reach full stature, Absorbs the evil in its nature."

"And striving to be Man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form."

"So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent."

"All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!"

"Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution."

"Like plants in mines, which never saw the sun, But dream of him, and guess where he may be, And do their best to climb, and get to him."

"He who moves not forward goes backward! A capital saying!"

"Il est un terme de la vie au-delà duquel en rétrograde en avançant."

"Hombre apercebido medio combatido."

"Westward the star of empire takes its way."

"Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time."

"Do not preach to me of progress. Change is not desirable for its own sake, but only if it offers improvement."

"Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last."

"Don't talk about "progress" in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness."

"Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost. Today's aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse."