The Progress Studies Commonplace Book
A collection of quotes and anecdotes about human progress
In my last post, I asked for your favorite quotes and stories about progress, energy, and abundance. Thanks to everyone who contributed (Jeremy Coté, Maarten Boudry, Josh Smith, Heike Larson, Ryan Puzycki, and Jason Crawford). Most of the entries have been submitted by my Roots of Progress cohort, all of whom have Substacks that are absolutely worth checking out.
My hope is that this is just the first iteration of our shared commonplace book. So if you missed your chance to contribute this time, keep an eye out for anecdotes and quotes and I’ll do another roundup sometime in 2024.
Progress
“The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude.” -Virginia Postrel
"Optimistic but dissatisfied is the road to progress." -Hannah Ritchie (You’ll see multiple quotes from Ritchie in this collection, and there would have been more if her upcoming book was published yet. I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, but my friend shared several quotes from his advanced reader copy that I’ll have to include when I update this post later on.)
"The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time." -Max Roser, Our World in Data
“There are no guarantees that things will turn out very well for anyone. A sunny disposition is not an action plan or a to-do list. ‘Just have faith’ is a strategy that forecloses our capacity to challenge power. If the world is going to get better, it will only happen through concerted, shared, collective effort.” -Dave Karpf
“The human brain is the ultimate resource” -Julian Simon
“How did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous? To answer that question you need to understand how…ideas have sex.” -Matt Ridley (In his Ted Talk on why the bleak outlook of the 1970s environmentalists and population control advocates turned out to be dead wrong). Or as NPR paraphrased: “The engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas.”
“Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.” -Steven Pinker
“Ideas are an inexhaustible resource” -Paul Romer
“It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them.” -David Deutsch
“In 2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV. (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)” -Steven Pinker, “Enlightenment Now”
“It is better to envy your neighbor’s Mercedes than to envy his horse and buggy. Envying his supersonic transport would be better still.” -Tyler Cowen, “Stubborn Attachments”
“My mother explained the magic of the washing machine the very first day. It was a miracle for my mother and me too. She said, “We have loaded the laundry. And now we can go to the library.” In went the laundry, and out came books. Thank you industrialization, thank you steel-mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical processing industry, for giving us the time to read books.” - Hans Rosling (Paraphrased from his Ted Talk)
“Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.” -Zadie Smith
“The combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.” -T.S. Eliot
“Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” -James Baldwin
Building a Vision for the Future
“In France, we do not have oil, but we do have ideas.” - 1974 French TV Commercial during Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency.
“We can be the first sustainable generation.” -Hannah Ritchie
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. … To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.” - C. S. Lewis
"The real history of this, or any, nation is the story of people and of those from among the people whose individual efforts make for a better living for everybody." -Norman Beasley
“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.” - CS Lewis, “The Silver Chair”
Leadership
“Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, how you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you wouldn’t be able to if there weren’t this person you respected and believed in and wanted to please. In other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.” - David Foster Wallace
"You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case." -Ken Kesey
Everyone needs a friend, a purpose, and a chance to belong to something greater than themselves. -James Mattis
Proverbs
“People bring prosperity.” - Josh Smith
"Cities are people." -Jerusalem Demsas
“Appreciation begets abundance.” Robin Wall Kimmerer
"Poverty is the greatest polluter." -Indira Gandhi
Don’t get it right, get it written. - James M. Buchanan (as quoted by Tyler Cowen).
“Progress is never a bargain.” -Inherit the Wind
Human Nature/Grab Bag
This section has quotes that don’t fit neatly into the other categories but I still think are worth sharing.
“Our intentions are the basic infrastructure of our lives.” - Maria Popova
“If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.” -John Green
“Men who are familiarized to danger meet it without shrinking; whereas troops unused to service often apprehend danger where no danger is.” - George Washington
“Marines believe that attitude is a weapons system.” - James Mattis
“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.” - CS Lewis
The next two quotes pair well together (thanks to Maarten for sharing).
"And there is nothing that exists so great or marvellous / That over time mankind does not admire it less and less." -Lucretius
"What have the Romans ever done for us?" -Monty Python's Life of Brain
Context: John Cleese’s character tries to rile his audience up by complaining about Roman oppression. “What have the Romans ever done for us?” The answer—Aqueducts, sanitation, medication, education, wine, and so on.
“You took the good things for granted. Now you must earn them again. For every right that you cherish, you have a duty which you must fulfill. For every good which you wish to preserve, you will have to sacrifice your comfort and your ease. There is nothing for nothing any longer.” - Walter Lippmann
“The energy of attempt is greater than the surety of stasis...you too can be carved anew by the details of your devotions.” -Mary Oliver
Feel free to pull from this collection for your own projects. And if reading these quotes reminded you of your own favorites, please share them below!