He who moves not forward goes backward! — Progress

"We can trace back our existence almost to a point. Former time presents us with trains of thoughts gradually diminishing to nothing. But our ideas of futurity are perpetually expanding. Our desires and our hopes, even when modified by our fears, seem to grasp at immensity. This alone would be sufficient to prove the progressiveness of our nature, and that this little earth is but a point from which we start toward a perfection of being."

"Even in the eighteenth century certain of the prevailing ideas or prejudices are awkward to reconcile with any scheme of history on the basis of progress. The regard for native reason, and the view that this was liable to be perverted by institutions, led to... daydreaming about the "" and the evils of civilization... as is illustrated in the writings of Rousseau."

"The wisest man may be wiser to-day than he was yesterday, and to-morrow than he is to-day. Total freedom from change would imply total freedom from error; but this is the prerogative of Omniscience alone. The world, however, are very censorious, and will hardly give a man credit for simplicity and singleness of heart, who is not only in the habit of changing his opinions, but also of bettering his fortunes by every change."

"Since progress is the rare exception, and not the rule, among the communities of mankind, it is less important to speculate about the reasons for its cessation among the ancient Egyptians than to observe how the technological advances made in the Near East became by degrees more widely diffused until they penetrated Europe. Neither Mesopotamia nor Egypt had the resources which would have enabled it to develop its civilization on a basis of autarky. They had never been self-contained as regards timber or metals or even ivory: in the second millenium B.C. the development of larger ships and better organized land transport encouraged greater efforts to satisfy their needs by importations. In exchanging the products of their superior technology for raw materials they stimulated imitation. Moreover, in ancient as in modern times the needs of trade often stimulated the desire for conquest, which likewise left its mark upon the life of neighboring peoples long after the tide of conquest had receded. Aggression then provoked counter-aggression: some barbarian intruders were eventually absorbed into the life of the two empires, others clashed with them, and kept their independence."

"Within any city or state or civilization... the natural operation of time was to produce internal corruption; the ordinary expected routine thing was a process of decadence. This could even be observed in a parallel manner in the physical world, where bodies would decompose and the finest fabrics in nature would suffer putrefaction. In fact, the current science chimed in with the current view of nature, for in both these realms it was held that compound bodies had a natural tendency to disintegrate. ... The reassertion of these ancient ideas on the subject of the historical process helps to explain why at the Renaissance it was almost less possible to believe in what we call progress than it was in the middle ages. If anything it was more easy to believe of something of this sort in the realm of spiritual matters than in any other sphere—to believe in stages of time succeeding one another in an ascending series... and so to find meaning and purpose in the passage of time itself."

"We are either progressing or retrograding all the while; there is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life."