A Quote by Zygmunt Bauman

The so called "progress," "time marching on," is not a straight line, but a pendulum.

Zygmunt Bauman

Quote Topics

Line Marching Marching On Pendulum Progress Straight Straight Line Time

Quote Author

Zygmunt Bauman
Polish - Sociologist
November 19, 1925 - January 9, 2017

I do not believe in eternal progress, that we are growing on ever and ever in a straight line. It is too nonsensical to believe. There is no motion in a straight line. A straight line infinitely projected becomes a circle. The force sent out will complete the circle and return to its starting place.

Swami Vivekananda

Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I do everything by hand... Even if I'm doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I'll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is.

Margaret Kilgallen

The straight line is godless and immoral. The straight line is not a creative line, it is a duplicating line, an imitating line.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

There's no straight line to progress.

Barack Obama

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what's remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

Benoit Mandelbrot

We know there is no progress in a straight line.

Swami Vivekananda

The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.

Benoit Mandelbrot

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

Pat Conroy

Science gains from it [the pendulum] more than one can expect. With its huge dimensions, the apparatus presents qualities that one would try in vain to communicate by constructing it on a small [scale], no matter how carefully. Already the regularity of its motion promises the most conclusive results. One collects numbers that, compared with the predictions of theory, permit one to appreciate how far the true pendulum approximates or differs from the abstract system called 'the simple pendulum'.

Leon Foucault

Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.

Haruki Murakami

I'm marching for women; I'm marching for the LGBT community. I'm marching for immigrants. I happen to fall into all three categories, so I'm marching for myself at the end of the day and for my family and my friends. And for whoever else deserves it.

Lauren Jauregui

But actually time isn't a straight line. It doesn't ave a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn't have any form. But since we can't picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution.

Haruki Murakami

There are many crooked lines and one straight line. Which is the line of truth? Why the straight line? Truth is always the shortest distance between two points.

Sun Myung Moon

You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.