Science […] has granted us the gifts of life, health, wealth, knowledge, and freedom documented in the chapters on progress. To take just one example from chapter 6, scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone. In case anyone has skimmed over this feat of moral greatness, let me say it again: scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone.

From many points of view we live in a glorious time. I have little sympathy with those who wish they had been born at any, even the most brilliant epoch, in the past of the human race. The Many have now opportunities of study, opportunities of travel, opportunities of healthy enjoyment, which of old were denied to all but the Few. Human activity is expanding in all directions. Life is infinitely fuller, more varied, more interesting than it ever was. But on the other hand it requires more judgment, more balance of mind, more strength of character to make the best of it. Where one can do so many things there is a real danger of trying to do too many, and the end of that is that one does nothing well. Every age has its own special difficulties and dangers. The disease which specially threatens this generation is restlessness, distraction, dissipation of intellectual and moral power. […]

Success will rest with those who can preserve a calm judgement, who will not be bewildered by the multitude of things offered to them, but select with tremendous rigour, and who finally, having selected, will give themselves time to enjoy what they have chosen, and not let themselves be flurried out of the enjoyment and the benefit of it by the thought of all that they have been obliged to pass by.

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Economic science […], if it be a science, differs from other sciences in this, that there is no inevitable advance from less to greater certainty; there is no ruthless tracking down of truth which, once unbared, shall be truth to all times to the complete confusion of any contrary doctrine.

The typical person in a rich industrial country lives better in material terms than any king or duke or the wealthiest financier in 1820 or even 1870. The suburban chariot—the ubiquitous minivan—provides safer, faster, and more comfortable travel than the grandest carriage ever built. Cellular telephone owners can pull from their pocket a device that can communicate more quickly and reliably with any corner of the globe than anything available to the most powerful world leader in 1900. Nearly every house in the developed world has flush toilets connected to an amazing system of waste treatment and disposal that eliminates the stench and disease that afflicted even the wealthiest in the nineteenth century. In the age of digital recordings, people have access to a wider variety of better-performed music anywhere they travel than the richest of courts could ever provide. Health conditions have improved enormously so that nearly every child in the industrial world is born with a better chance to reach adulthood than the richest could achieve.