Accelerating Quotes & Sayings

Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating. — Jay McInerney

How impossible it is for us to imagine ourselves victims of disaster. We suffer for the poor people who were thrown into the sea from their cruise ship off the coast of Tuscany, some losing their lives. Imagine a world of accelerating natural disasters, one after the other so that nobody can help anyone else. — Vivienne Westwood

I think the pressure has also helped me want to rise above that pressure, and it has helped in accelerating the healing process. It's helped give me a drive. I have a definite survival drive, and the pressure gave me a drive to get on top of it. — Axl Rose

Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Galaxies of the universe are racing away from us, but that they are doing so at a rate that is accelerating. — Bill Bryson

Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state. — Eric Foner

Technology plows through history at an accelerating rate, shifting the burden of production off labor into the nonhuman factor because man uses his highest ingenuity to avoid servile labor. — Louis O. Kelso

THE NEW

All that appeared true seems to be coming unglued;
All that was established is being questioned anew;
All that was in place is being quickly erased;

We are coming to a crossroad on a collision course and the train is rapidly accelerating;
The winds of the New are howling and anxious to be embraced;
The usual is blinding and needs to be replaced;

So turn it around and rethink your thoughts;
The old ways are going and the cracks are showing;
Reshape the unchangeable and shake the unshakable;
Then face the new light with its brilliance absorbing you;

Now you've left behind what shouldn't have been and attained a new plateau to view the past;
When you arise the old will be left in the wake;
And you will go forward to a better place.

The Complaint, page 34. — Tom Breen

If there is anything unique about the human animal, it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. — John N. Gray

The collapse of the world's banking system and the impending disaster of accelerating climate change are not separate phenomena. They are simply the most visible symptoms of a particular model of capitalism that will bring civilisation to its knees. But those symptoms will not get sorted unless and until we commit to a radical transformation of the way we create and distribute wealth in the world today — Jonathon Porritt

We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are. — Stephen Marche

In the ever accelerating world of the Internet, e-campaigning has gone from a novelty to a necessity in less than a year. With increasing sophistication and urgency, campaigns are using the Web as a bulletin board, advertising medium and organizing tool. — Howard Fineman

"The ultimate recession": a recession caused not by failed regulation and bankers' greed, but by very high oil prices, food and water shortages, disappearing forests, accelerating climate change, forced migration and mass civil disruption ... The long and the short of it, unfortunately, is this: more politicians still believe that economic recovery depends on continuing to live beyond our means (financially and ecologically) than on learning to live within our means. And that's why the ultimate "Perfect Storm" recession still looms on the horizon — Jonathon Porritt

In a society caught up in the race for the better, limits on change are experienced as a threat. The commitments to the better at any cost makes the good impossible at all costs. Failure to renew the bill of goods frustrates the expectation of what is possible, while renewal of the bill of goods intensifies the expectations of unattainable progress. What people have and what they are about to get are equally exasperating to them. Accelerating change has become both addictive and intolerable. At this point the balance among stability, change and tradition has been upset; society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation. Judgement on precedents has lost its value. — Ivan Illich

Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century. However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c. — Charles Stross

The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic and political patterns ... it is safe to predict that ... such social inventions as modern-type capitalism, facism and communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed towards the adjustment of modern society to modern methods — Ralph Linton

It's Obama's bad luck that he got elected just as the mayhem of the foreclosures, the banking collapse, and the General Motors disaster was accelerating the surge in unemployment to warp speed. — Tina Brown

Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sense of purposefulness or acknowledge the meaninglessness of life. We can seek to escape the drudgery and pain of life through alcohol, drugs, or pleasure seeking, or by working to support our families and create artistic testaments to our worldly existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Nowadays, ideas can meet and mate very much faster than before, and the Internet is only accelerating this process. So innovation is bound to accelerate. — Matt Ridley

They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. — Carl Sagan

Things are both getting better and getting worse. The madness is accelerating but an acceleration of the new consciousness is also coming in. However, this latter development is less apparent when you listen to the media. The media still mostly reflects what is happening in the sphere of the old consciousness. — Eckhart Tolle

We live in a world where knowledge is developing at an ever-accelerating rate. Drink deeply from this ever-springing well of wisdom and human experience. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Blood drummed in her ears and adrenaline coursed through her veins, driving her to move. To act. Her hands trembled against his chest.

Time vanished out from beneath her feet, one accelerating second at a time. — G.S. Jennsen

He was astonished at how calm he found he was. Fear of death had always energised him, making him move far more quickly than his body should have been capable of, accelerating his reactions and his thought process to a quite incredible level. This time, though, he only thought, Oh, and realised that he didn't really care all that much. He could feel his responsibilities, the love of others towards him, the unfulfilled possibilities; they were like a child's hand trying to pull him up, doing its best but simply not strong enough for the job. Above all, there was no blame. I tried to climb a wall, but I couldn't, and there it is. — K.J. Parker

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.
As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write.
As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall.
As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun. — Stephen King

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world. — Richard Flanagan

We've known for a long time that the universe is expanding. But about 15 years ago, my colleagues and I discovered that it is expanding faster and faster. That is, the universe is accelerating, and that was not expected, but it is now attributed to this mysterious stuff called dark energy which seems to make up about 70 percent of the universe. — Adam Riess

Few problems are less recognized, but more important than, the accelerating disappearance of the earth's biological resources. In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched. — Paul R. Ehrlich

My concept was, within the five-minute video, for people to see one million Buddhas. So I made a group of the images and it keeps accelerating to reach this one million point. The movie was invented from the still photos. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

Chance dug deep into the dirt, his front end rising like a speed boat accelerating through water. I grabbed the saddle horn, surprised by his enthusiasm, but I was just as anxious to run as he was. I gave him the reins to go. — Brittney Joy

Second issue is the rapidly accelerating increase in the number of vulnerabilities that get discovered every day. And, equally importantly, is the shortening of time between the discovery of the vulnerability and the release of an exploit. — John W. Thompson

There is onslaught is the accelerating momentum of technologies and instrumental mentalities that are exterminating spontaneity, undermining love and common decency. It's a thief of time and includes all the palpable and subtle violations of body, mind, and spirit done in the name of science, government, enterprise, progress, and profit. — Stephanie Mills

Mona wasn't listening. Of course a bet was a bet, she thought. And there was her reputation to consider. Not to mention her safety. Particularly her safety. For she was frightened of Emoto Hed, who had something of a reputation for creative cruelty where unpaid debts were concerned. People disappeared, leaving behind nothing but very long, very piercing screams. Mona imagined that forever could become incredibly tedious when passed in a state of constantly accelerating agony. — Meg Rosoff

Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation ... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. — Paul Hawken

The world is getting so reality-driven these days. It seems to be accelerating exponentially. But it's a dangerous game for a lot of people. — Keith Urban

We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive. — Lee Smolin

I do love television. But the business is accelerating and people are not getting the chance to fail. — Dick Wolf

The heroic "hands-on" leader whose personal competence and force of will dominated battlefields and boardrooms for generations has been overwhelmed by accelerating speed, swelling complexity, and interdependence. Even the most successful of today's heroic leaders appear uneasy in the saddle, all too aware that their ability to understand and control is a chimera. — Stanley McChrystal

In Japan, the average age of agricultural workers is 65.8. When the aging of its population is accelerating so rapidly, it will be very difficult to sustain the sector whether we liberalize trade or not. — Naoto Kan

It's hard to walk briskly at this time of year; the accelerating pace of unfolding spring slows my own. I repeatedly stop- to watch what's moving. Soon the torrent of migrants will completely overwhelm my ability to keep up with all the changes. But it's easy to revel in the exuberance and the sense of rebirth, renewal. — Carl Safina

We recognized in 1996 that, with progress in the field of genetics accelerating at a breathtaking pace, we need to ensure that advances in treatment and prevention of disease do not constitute a new basis for discrimination. — Olympia Snowe

What we should be doing [in US] is accelerating every year our efforts to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, have a cleaner energy future, have much more energy conservation. And this won't hurt anybody. This will create a new economy for America, if we've got the discipline to do it. — William J. Clinton

Currently a level of unemployment of 7 percent or more seems to be required to keep inflation from accelerating, a level quite unacceptable as a permanent situation. — William Vickrey

When dealing with Arab society, [we are dealing with] a production system that is in competition with others (and not with a theoretical opposition between specific economic rationalities), a social structure that must at all times prove its viability in the world arena (and not with its inner logic, which is theoretically as total, as elegant, and plausible as that of any other society whatever), a practical politics that is in perpetual disequilibrium (and not with elaborate theories about the best form of government), a language that must constantly prove its creativity and capacity for adaptation in competition with other languages in an accelerating evolutionary situation (and not with a theory of the language at a given moment of its evolution). — Abdallah Laroui

Enterprises are just starting to adopt and integrate the iPad into their networks, but this is accelerating, and that's an opportunity for Infosys. — Kris Gopalakrishnan

Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo - charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry. — Lionel Shriver

Seasons continued to bleed from one to the next, their paces accelerating for each aging consciousness. Stars flared out in phoenix fire flashes, their dust tithing - each grain an alchemist's bounty - soon reaped by solar winds. These same winds howled for the living, and all of those yet to be born. — Jeremy Thompson

The world is going mad at an accelerating rate and television is the Typhoid Mary of this madness. — Edward Robb Ellis

Time passes at the same speed until romance enters. From that very second the priceless commodity becomes erratic and unstable by accelerating whenever they are together and slowing to an excruciating crawl whenever they are apart. — Carl Henegan

Ocean acidification - the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid - is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together. — Sylvia Earle

I wish i'd hurt him I didn't do any damage at all-Bella
I can fix that-edward
I was hoping you would say that-bella
there was a slight pause "that doesn't sound like you what did he do"-edward
he kissed me-bella
all i heard on the other end of the line was the sound of an engine accelerating — Stephenie Meyer

The ship left the construction bay of the factory craft with most of its fitting-out still to be done. Accelerating hard, its course a four-dimensional spiral through a blizzard of stars where it knew that only danger waited, it powered into hyperspace on spent engines from an overhauled craft of one class, watched its birthplace disappear astern with battle-damaged sensors from a second, and tested outdated weapon units cannibalized from yet another. Inside its warship body, in narrow, unlit, unheated, hard-vacuum spaces, constructor drones struggled to install or complete sensors, displacers, field generators, shield disruptors, laserfields, plasma chambers, warhead magazines, maneuvering units, repair systems and the thousands of other major and minor components required to make a functional warship. Gradually, — Iain M. Banks

We cannot deal with the increasing maldistribution of wealth, the increasing alienation of millions, or the lack of a unified purpose and goal by increasing the efficiency of production, increasing the automation of industry, accelerating our technology, or increasing our reliance on the profit motives of multinational corporations. — Carl R. Rogers

For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world. — John Seely Brown

In the long run, we need to build a leadership force of people. We have a whole strategy around not only providing folks with the foundational experience during their two years with us, but also then accelerating their leadership in ways that is strategic for the broader education reform movement. — Wendy Kopp

The pace of this match is really accelerating, by which I mean it's getting faster all the time. — David Coleman

All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it. — James Lovelock

What those two young physicists did remains the most important step yet made in the search for quantum gravity. They gave us two general and simple laws, which were the first physical predictions to come from the study of quantum gravity. They are: Unruh's law. Accelerating observers see themselves as embedded in a gas of hot photons at a temperature proportional to their acceleration. Bekenstein's law With every horizon that forms a boundary separating an observer from a region which is hidden from them, there is associated an entropy which measures the amount of information which is hidden behind it. This entropy is always proportional to the area of the horizon. — Lee Smolin

When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause. — Douglas Rushkoff

When Holden pointed out that the Roci was already capable of accelerating fast enough to kill her crew and asked why they'd need to upgrade her, Amos had replied, "Because this shit is awesome." Holden had just nodded and smiled and paid the bill. Even — James S.A. Corey

The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating. — Alan Greenspan

We are living through the most profound changes in the economy since the Industrial Revolution. Technology, globalization, and the accelerating pace of change have yielded chaotic markets, fierce competition, and unpredictable staff requirements. — Bruce Tulgan

Fully 57 percent of American college students are women. Life insurance companies sell more policies to women than to men. As women continue to draw on experience and education, they're accelerating their numbers in upper management, too. — Suzanne Fields

The last months, weeks and days have seen accelerating discussions, involving the DUP for the first time, about a comprehensive agreement which would see all outstanding matters dealt with and the Good Friday Agreement implemented in full. — Gerry Adams

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up, the Universe will end in ice. — Saul Perlmutter

The pace of change for entrepreneurs is rapidly accelerating, and the cost and risk of launching a new business and getting off the ground is just amazing. The ability to gain user feedback really quickly and adapt to what your consumers want is totally different with the web as it is now. But finding a new market, helping people and taking that original idea and turning it into a business is really exciting right now. — Matt Mickiewicz

Humankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

It must be granted that many aspects of the intellectual life of that era showed energy and grandeur. We moderns explain its concomitant uncertainty and falseness as a symptom of the horror which seized men when at the end of an era of apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly confronting a void: great material scarcity, a period of political and military crises, and an accelerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue and dignity and even of its own existence. Yet that very period, filled though it was with premonitions of doom, was marked by some very fine intellectual achievements, — Hermann Hesse

For him, the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold ... — David Grossman

I believe that entrepreneurs play an unmatched role and the accelerating pace of innovation is transforming the face of global challenges. You must think about the solution differently when you're trying to impact 1 billion people rather than affecting 1 million people. — Naveen Jain

He reached out a hand behind the headrest of his seat and Kate took it, and they squeezed. The pressure created a fixed point in time, to which so many accelerating events could be anchored. — Chris Cleave

In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic. — Alvin Toffler

Instead of having a set of policies that are equipping people for the globalization of the economy, we have policies that are accelerating the most destructive trends of the global economy. — Barack Obama

I believe prayer for our nation has never been more important as we witness an accelerating anti-Christian fervor in the so-called mainstream of our culture. — Jonathan Falwell

Our best long-term and intermediate cycles suggest another slowdown and stock crash accelerating between very early 2014 and early 2015, and possibly lasting well into 2015 or even 2016. The worst economic trends due to demographics will hit between 2014 and 2019. The U.S. economy is likely to suffer a minor or major crash by early 2015 and another between late 2017 and late 2019 or early 2020 at the latest. — Marc Faber

Law Number XXIV: The only thing more costly than stretching the schedule of an established project is accelerating it, which is itself the most costly action known to man. — Norman Ralph Augustine

The profusion of fonts is one more product of the digital revolution. Beginning in the mid-'80s and accelerating in the 1990s, type design weathered the sort of radical, technology-driven transformation that other creative industries, including music, publishing, and movies, now face. — Virginia Postrel

Our world is moving at an ever-accelerating pace, and with the advent of social media, what happens in New York now can be reported across the globe 60 seconds later. — Stuart Rose

Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating. — Brian Schmidt

This basic problem of relevance-cum-subservience has been given an added twist in the modern world, where relevance has become not only hollow but fragile and short-lived. A wider range of choices, a deeper uncertainty of events, a more pressing need for new styles - all this makes for an accelerating turnover of issues, concerns and fads. Nothing tires like a trend or ages faster than a fashion. Today's bold headline is tomorrow's yellowing newsprint. Thus the relevance-hungry liberals achieve relevance, but their victory is Pyrrhic. It is precisely as they win that they lose. As they become relevant to one group or movement, they become irrelevant to another and find themselves rudely dismissed. Far from being in the avant-garde, Christian liberals trot smartly behind the times. Far from being genuinely new or radical, they catch up and announce their discoveries breathlessly, only to see the vanguard disappearing down the road on the trail of a different pursuit. — Os Guinness

But there's still so much you can do with technology to improve the customer experience. And that's the sense in which I believe it's still Day One, and that it's early in the day. If anything, the rate of change is accelerating. — Jeff Bezos

Great cycles of history began with vigorous cultures awakening to the needs of children, but collapsing with frayed family ties. Have we failed to learn lessons which Ancient China, Greece and Rome learned too late - about day care and death houses for old folks? Do we without protest accept accelerating preschool and nursing home cultures which warn ominously that the earlier you institutionalize your child, the earlier he will institutionalize you! — Raymond S. Moore

The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue. — Stewart Brand

Let your thoughts move to and fro like an accelerating pendulum, taking ever wider swings. "He's my Father - and he's God in heaven; he's God in heaven - and he's my Father! It's beyond belief - but it's true!" Grasp this, or rather, let it grasp you; then tell God what you feel about it; and that will be the worship which our Lord wanted to evoke when he gave us this thought-pattern for the invocation of the One who is both his Father and ours. — J.I. Packer

I do not like this idea that we have begun to kill off - at great velocity and accelerating speed - all of the things that sustain us. I didn't like it at all when I first thought of it, but most people around me do not seem that disturbed by it, even though the knowledge of this is obvious and readily available to anyone who looks up trees on the Internet. At least, no one seems bothered, because no one has taken action to amend it. So they must not care. That is the only explanation I can think of for the lack of reaction to this fact. — Ned Hayes

The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The "death play" of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels. — Richard J. Borden

The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion. — Ray Kurzweil

We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever. Existing knowledge can be aggressively applied to dramatically slow down aging processes so we can still be in vital health when the more radical life extending therapies from biotechnology and nanotechnology become available. But most baby boomers won't make it because they are unaware of the accelerating aging process in their bodies and the opportunity to intervene. — Ray Kurzweil

Climate change is not a major issue because it will cause sea level rises or temperature increases, since we know how to live at higher elevations and regulate the temperature within our homes. It is a major issue because ecosystems are finding it difficult to adapt to the rapidity of the climate and environmental changes and are dying off, thereby accelerating the species extinction that is already underway due to our consumption habits. — Shailesh Rao

NIKE is focused on elevating and accelerating innovation in our products, services and our digital ecosystem. This requires progressive and agile technology solutions that keep pace with our growth, which is what Juniper's solutions offer. — Anthony Watson

The most formidable attribute of temptation is its increasing power, its accelerating ratio of velocity. Every act of repetition increases power, diminishes resistance. It is like the letting out of waters-where a drop can go, a river can go. Whoever yields to temptation, subjects himself to the law of falling bodies. — Horace Mann

He is accelerating all the time. That last lap was run in 64 seconds and the one before in 62. — David Coleman

In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution. — Nina Fedoroff

Make no mistake: business forces, if used long-sightedly, are the tools for leveraging new consumer behaviors, new and smarter ways of production, and for accelerating the transition to a sustainable world. — Guilherme Leal

Fragile economies and weak infrastructures tend to worsen the results of climate disruptions, a problem exemplified by Bangladesh's vulnerability to monsoons, accelerating desertification in northern China, and, most visibly, Hurricane Katrina's devastation in New Orleans. — Jamais Cascio

Again, as it was after Udayan's death, there was an acute awareness of time, of the future looming, accelerating. The baby's lifetime, so scant, already outdistancing and outpacing her own. This was the logic of parenthood. — Jhumpa Lahiri

The global realignment is accelerating the migration of growth and wealth dynamics from the industrial world to the larger emerging economies. — Mohamed El-Erian

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. — Stanislaw Ulam

What is it in fact, this learning to fly? To be precise, it is 'to learn NOT to fly wrong.' To learn to become a pilot is to learn - not to let oneself fly too slowly. Not to let oneself turn without accelerating. Not to cross the controls. Not to do this, and not to do that ... To pilot is negation. — Henri Mignet

All of us are feeling scattered and distracted as we try to keep up with an accelerating world. But nearly all of us have an answer in our hands, in simply choosing to do nothing and go nowhere for a while. — Pico Iyer