Quotes About Improvement

Not only has chronic undernourishment been in decline, but so have catastrophic famines

That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013," Norberg writes. "After having lived, loved and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.

Figure 12-5 shows that in 1970 the chance that an airline passenger would die in a plane crash was less than five in a million; by 2015 that small risk had fallen a hundredfold.

To acknowledge that the lives of the lower and middle classes of developed countries have improved in recent decades is not to deny the formidable problems facing 21st-century economies.

people today live far more years in the pink of health than their ancestors lived altogether, healthy and infirm years combined

disasters are instant, improvements are gradual

A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn't exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patted by a switchboard operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.

In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don'ts.

people adapt to their circumstances, good or bad, the way their eyes adapt to sun or darkness. From that neutral point, improvement is happiness, loss is misery.

We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.

The Enlightenment is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.

As impressive as the conquest of infectious disease in Europe and America was, the ongoing progress among the global poor is even more astonishing.

education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.

In many Islamic countries, attitudes toward women and minorities are improving (chapter 15)—slowly, but more detectably among women, the young, and the educated.105 The emancipative forces that liberalized the West, such as connectivity, education, mobility, and women's advancement, are not bypassing the Islamic world, and the moving sidewalk of generational replacement can outpace the walkers shambling along it.106

how low it has sunk—to 10 percent. In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.

In the richest country two centuries ago (the Netherlands), life expectancy was just forty, and in no country was it above forty-five. Today, life expectancy in the poorest country in the world (the Central African Republic) is fifty-four, and in no country is it below forty-five.

la falta de atención a los descubrimientos que han transformado la vida para mejor justifica una crítica de nuestra apreciación de la condición humana moderna.

In some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world's people have become better off.

If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.

What launched the Great Escape? The most obvious cause was the application of science to the improvement of material life, leading to what the economic historian Joel Mokyr calls "the enlightened economy.

The fact that mean measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is ok. That the environment got better by itself or that we can just sit back and relax for the cleaner environment that we enjoy today, we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulation, treaties and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.

If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve them, try them out, and keep the

The economist Steven Radelet has pointed out that "the improvements in health among the global poor in the last few decades are so large and widespread that they rank among the greatest achievements in human history.