Progress just means bad things happen faster.
Interpretation
Progress often accelerates the occurrence of problems rather than solving them.
Terry Pratchett's quote suggests a cynical view of progress, indicating that while advancements may improve efficiency and speed, they can also lead to complications and negative consequences that arise more rapidly than before. This perspective challenges the notion that progress inherently leads to better outcomes, inviting a critical examination of how advancements can sometimes create new challenges.
In practice
During a lecture on technological advancements, you could use this quote to highlight the unforeseen issues that arise from innovation.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
The world can therefore seize the opportunity (the Persian Gulf crisis) to fulfill the long held promise of a New World Order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind.
Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
While the goal of the American dream is to make much of us, the goal of the gospel is to make much of God.
We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures.
I have but one system of ethics for men and for nations - to be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements under all circumstances, to be open and generous, promoting in the long run even the interests of both
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