Design
We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it. We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to. We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress: personally I prefer to call it reform. For reform implies form. It implies that we are trying to shape
... See moreG. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • Orthodoxy
For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress.
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • Heretics
Whether there is a long-run direction in evolution, and whether that direction is to be considered progress are of course two different questions.
Herbert A. Simon • The Sciences of the Artificial
Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins. Our obsession with certainty has another side effect. It distorts our vision through a set of funhouse mirrors called unknown knowns.
Ozan Varol • Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
the main principle of art, the principle which is in most danger of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact that art consists of limitation; the fact that art is limitation. Art does not consist in expanding things. Art consists of cutting things down,
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
We know the meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet saying ‘These things are.’ It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying, ‘Why cannot these things be?’
G K. Chesterton • The Everlasting Man (with linked TOC)
A paradoxical, but perhaps realistic, view of design goals is that their function is to motivate activity which in turn will generate new goals.
Herbert A. Simon • The Sciences of the Artificial
Things that happen very seldom we all leave out of our calculations, whether they are miraculous or not.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]

The ideal must be preserved through all iteration.
(Chesterton, Orthodoxy)