Quote

People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't.

Social change comes through people.

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.'

When it comes to social consequences, they've got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it's a difficult task.

Real progress comes from people.

If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom.

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

Successful people have a social responsibility to make the world a better place and not just take from it.

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.