This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
The aim, and test, of progress under a truly Christian dispensation on Earth would not lie in the field of mundane social life; the field would be the spiritual life of individual souls in their passage through this earthly life from birth into this world to death out of it.
Birth | Death | Earth | Individual | Life | Life | Progress | World |
All progress requires change but all change is not progress.
Behold the turtle, who makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
Progress |
Happiness is the engine of progress. All progress starts with dissatisfaction.
Progress |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
The regular social progress though which a growing society advances from one stage in its growth to another is a compound movement in which a creative individual or minority first withdraws from the common life of the society, then works out, in seclusion, a solution for some problem with which the society as a whole is confronted, and finally re-enters into communion with the rest of society in order to help it forward on its road by imparting to it the results of the creative work which the temporarily secluded individual or minority has accomplished during the interval between withdrawal and return.
Growth | Individual | Life | Life | Order | Progress | Rest | Seclusion | Society | Work | Society |
The widespread modern rejection of ritual in religion is depriving people of powerful aids for spiritual development and for defense against evil... Action cannot lead beyond action, and therefore no ritual can produce Liberation... But there are many who do not specifically seek Liberation but simply greater purity, greater devotion, general spiritual betterment, or who seek Liberation as the still unseen goal of a winding path; and it is for such as these that the appropriate ritual would be a powerful armament for progress and defense.
Action | Defense | Devotion | Evil | People | Progress | Purity | Religion |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of the tribe.
Civilization | Existence | Progress | Public | Society | Society |
There can be change without progress, but not progress without change.
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Civilization | Existence | Man | Men | Progress | Public | Society | Society |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Change is one thing, progress is another. "Change" is scientific, "progress" is ethical; change is indisputable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
Change | Controversy | Progress |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Men sometimes speak as though the progress of science must necessarily be a boon to mankind, but that, I fear, is one of the comfortable nineteenth century delusions which our more disillusioned age must discard.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
'Change' is scientific, 'progress' is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
Change | Controversy | Progress |
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
Progress |