On Literature: On Society (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." (Charles Fort, "Lo!", 1931)

"The machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)

"At least half of mankind [...] still makes an unconscious equation in its thinking, and assumes that change - any sort of change - is identical with progress. It is not so; and any student of the course of evolutionary history on Terra could tell you of change which has been regressive, change which has led to an ultimately fatal specialization, change which has been overadaptation to an ecological niche which no longer existed, or did not yet exist." (Margaret St Clair, "Agent of the Unknown", 1952)

"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." (Frederik Pohl, "Day Million", 1966)

"Progress is a tension between the notion of perfection and the notion that striving, not finding, is important." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Her grandparents, believers in progress, had always told her things were better now. Human minds had been darker when people couldn’t read late at night, their prejudices greater when they had lacked television’s images of other places, their work harder without the appliances many took for granted. Nina was not so sure; technical civilization had isolated people from the basics of life, and had fooled them into believing that they controlled the world." (Pamela Sargent, "The Old Darkness", 1983)

"An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake." (Frank Wilczek,"The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces", 2008)