Progress is hubris and nemesis fused together.

human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

Over and over our plans foundered on human nature. On the mediocrity of human nature that betrays its better self, its best ideals, that is unworthy of itself everywhere.
"Shocking, the mediocrity of everything - is it not?

For a civilisation so fixated on achieving happiness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task.

Great achievements require gigantic efforts, without which our progress sound to be slow.

Marriage laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence. We have not yet found the right road to conquering ourselves and our environment.

What shall I say concerning its mastery of and its waste of mechanical power, its commonwealth so poor, its enemies of the commonwealth so rich, its stupendous organization — for the misery of life! Its contempt of simple pleasures which everyone could enjoy but for its folly? Its eyeless vulgarity which has destroyed art, the one certain solace of labour? All this I felt then as now, but I did not know why it was so. The hope of the past times was gone, the struggles of mankind for many ages had produced nothing but this sordid, aimless, ugly confusion.

[T]he restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress...

Such... but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Religion can get on with any sort of astronomy, geology, biology, physics. But it cannot get on with a purposeless and meaningless universe. If the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit of modern man.