[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.

Bill Bryson
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw

  2. No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere. - Sigmund Freud

  3. We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done. - Alan Turing

  4. ..[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody... - Karl Marx

  5. Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible. - Frank Zappa

More Quotes By Bill Bryson
  1. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only...

  2. If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly...

  3. As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?

  4. I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

  5. Thoreau was an idiot.

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