"Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long"
About this Quote
Progress is supposed to be our favorite bedtime story: tomorrow will fix what today broke. Ogden Nash punctures that comforting plot with a one-liner that works like a banana peel on the march of history. The joke lands because it treats "progress" not as an abstract good but as something with the social etiquette of a houseguest who won’t leave. Once, it was charming. Now it’s eating your groceries and rearranging the furniture.
Nash’s intent is classic light-verse sabotage: take a pious civic word and make it feel faintly ridiculous. "Might have been alright once" is a sly concession, the rhetorical equivalent of letting the booster club speak before you point out the scoreboard’s on fire. Then comes the twist: progress isn’t criticized for failing, but for succeeding too relentlessly. That’s the subtextual sting. Even improvements carry a cost in fatigue, displacement, and the sense that the ground is always moving under your feet.
The context matters. Nash wrote through the era when "progress" meant not just better appliances and higher wages, but world wars, mechanized slaughter, the assembly line, the bomb, and a culture speeding up faster than people could metabolize. His line catches the mid-century suspicion that modernity’s benefits were arriving bundled with anxiety, planned obsolescence, and a creeping loss of control.
It’s wit with a dark edge: not anti-innovation so much as anti-permanently-upgrading. The laugh is recognition - and a warning that "forward" can become its own kind of trap.
Nash’s intent is classic light-verse sabotage: take a pious civic word and make it feel faintly ridiculous. "Might have been alright once" is a sly concession, the rhetorical equivalent of letting the booster club speak before you point out the scoreboard’s on fire. Then comes the twist: progress isn’t criticized for failing, but for succeeding too relentlessly. That’s the subtextual sting. Even improvements carry a cost in fatigue, displacement, and the sense that the ground is always moving under your feet.
The context matters. Nash wrote through the era when "progress" meant not just better appliances and higher wages, but world wars, mechanized slaughter, the assembly line, the bomb, and a culture speeding up faster than people could metabolize. His line catches the mid-century suspicion that modernity’s benefits were arriving bundled with anxiety, planned obsolescence, and a creeping loss of control.
It’s wit with a dark edge: not anti-innovation so much as anti-permanently-upgrading. The laugh is recognition - and a warning that "forward" can become its own kind of trap.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Ogden Nash , quotation commonly cited as: "Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long." Listed on Ogden Nash quotation collections. |
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