Social Progress Quotes

• Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Block, Order, Law

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2011). “Why We Can't Wait”, p.62, Beacon Press

  121 Copy quote

  Show source

• Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism.

  Earl Warren

  Eugenics, Government, People

  Address to National Press Club in Washington DC. Freedom and Union magazine, April 1952.

  77 Copy quote

  Show source

• Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex.

  Karl Marx

  Sex, Philosophical, Progress

  "Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: selected correspondence, 1846-1895: with explanatory notes".

  108 Copy quote

  Show source

• The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Money, Economic Inequality, History

  Second Inaugural Address, 20 Jan. 1937

  298 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is the duty of youth to bring fresh new powers to bear on Social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should life the world forward. That is what they are for.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Peace, Tired, Army

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1912). “The Forerunner”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Inspirational, Change, Wisdom

  303 Copy quote

• Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

  Karl Marx

  Sex, Progress, Ugly

  43 Copy quote
• 

  The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Life, Motivational, Change

  Man and Superman "Maxims for Revolutionists" (1903) See Hawthorne 18

  410 Copy quote

  Show source

• The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

  Charles Fourier

  Women, Equality, Sisterhood

  Theory of Four Movements vol. 2, ch. 4 (1808)

  62 Copy quote

  Show source

• I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.

  John Dewey

  Educational, Believe, Progress

  John Dewey (1972). “The Early Works, 1882-1898: 1895-1898. Early essays”, p.93, SIU Press

  125 Copy quote

  Show source

• All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Change, Success, Creativity

  Man and Superman "Maxims for Revolutionists" (1903) See Hawthorne 18

  99 Copy quote

  Show source

• The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress.

  Helene Deutsch

  Thinking, Rights, Progress

  Helene Deutsch (1973). “Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue”, W. W. Norton

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The making of an Atheist implies a mental stimulation and training which brings into play the primary factors of social progress.

  Joseph McCabe

  Atheist, Play, Training

  9 Copy quote

• The social progress, order, security and peace of each country are necessarily connected with the social progress, order, security and peace of all other countries.

  Pope John XXIII

  Country, Order, Diversity

  Pacem in Terris (1963) p. 150

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

  Alfred de Vigny

  Heart, Progress, Analysis

  Alfred de Vigny (1923). “Cinq Mars”

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

  George Henry Lewes

  Hygiene, Progress, Literature

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Brother, Our Generation, America

  7 Copy quote

• Advertising as the printed form of selling would seem . . . ultimately to be justified in so far as it serves as a means of increasing legitimate human wants, as an agency of fair and economic competition in the distribution of goods, and as a stimulant to social progress.

  Daniel Starch

  Mean, Agency, Competition

  8 Copy quote

• Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.

  Oscar Niemeyer

  Country, Struggle, Giving

  "Oscar Niemeyer, Architect Who Gave Brasi­lia Its Flair, Dies at 104" by Nicolai Ouroussoff, www.nytimes.com. December 5, 2012.

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human security comes only with human rights and the rule of law. Human rights are the basis for creating strong and accountable states without which there can be no political stability or social progress.

  Irene Khan

  Strong, Rights, Law

  4 Copy quote

• All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

  Samuel Butler

  Inspirational, Funny, Life

  Notebooks (1912) ch. 1

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below; and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment of democracy; universal brotherhood can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity - of opportunity in the social, political and individual life.

  Bhagat Singh

  Opportunity, Political, Brotherhood

  491 Copy quote

• If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom. The two are inseparable partners in the great adventure of humanity.

  Robert Kennedy

  Adventure, Two, Humanity

  Robert F. Kennedy (1964). “The Pursuit of Justice”, New York : Harper & Row

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.

  Thomas Huxley

  Mean, Survival, Progress

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1997). “The Major Prose of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.327, University of Georgia Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.

  A. J. Muste

  Fashion, Real, Struggle

  "American Power and the New Mandarins". Book by Noam Chomsky, 1969.

  15 Copy quote

  Show source