Progress

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur: like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

We have faith that future generations will know that here, in the middle of the twentieth century, there came a time when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

After centuries of dormancy, young women can now look toward a future moulded by their own hands.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Hope renewed because we know so well the progress we have made.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Progress is the stride of God.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.