A Quote by Norbert Wiener

It is possible to believe in progress as a fact without believing in progress as an ethical principle; but in the catechism of many Americans, the one goes with the other.

Norbert Wiener

Quote Topics

Believe Believing Catechism Ethical Fact Goes Many Other Possible Principle Progress Without

Quote Author

Norbert Wiener
American - Mathematician
November 26, 1894 - March 18, 1964

I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.

Philip Kitcher

We believe this approach (progress sharing) is a rational approach because you cooperate in creating the abundance that makes the progress possible, and then you share that progress after the fact, and not before the fact. Profit sharing would resolve the conflict between management apprehensions and worker expectations on the basis of solid economic facts as they materialize rather than on the basis of speculation as to what the future might hold.

Walter Reuther

The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

David Bowie

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Franz Kafka

Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.

Freeman Dyson

I believe it safe to say that all progress must lead, not to further progress, but finally to the negation of progress, a return to the point of departure.

Eugene Delacroix

I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a 'matter-of-fact' habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. Without 'ethical culture' there is no salvation for humanity.

Albert Einstein

These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness.

Anthony de Mello

Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

Bertrand Russell

The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.

Paul Feyerabend

We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

Jorge Luis Borges

We can call this "the progress principle": Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: "Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing."

Jonathan Haidt

The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature.

H. A. L. Fisher

One can believe God capable of anything without believing that he did everything anybody may say he did. One can believe in the possibility of miracles without believing that every reported miracle must in fact have happened.