Progress Quotes

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first.”

“But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, Leaving no tract behind.”

“The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.”

“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics andtrade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”

“It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.”

“The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.”

“A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.”

“Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.”

“Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.”

“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poeticyouth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”

“Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.”

“Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.”

“Revolutions go not backward.”

“The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men to thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by theopulent, can be enjoyed by all.”

“Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark”

“The walking of Man is falling forwards.”

“Invention breeds invention.”

“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

“The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.”

“Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.”

“Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.”

“All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.”

“If we suddenly plant our foot, and say, - I will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric which I do not know to be innocent, or deal with any person whose whole manner of life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still. Whose is so? Not mine; not thine; not his. But I think we must clear ourselves each one by the interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit? and we must not cease to tend to the correction of these flagrant wrongs, by laying one stone aright every day.”

“The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”

“Let the river roll which way it will, cities will rise on its banks.”