"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 | Verified source: Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation Is Beater Than Yours (Ogden Nash, 1959)
Evidence: Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long; I think progress began to retrogress when Wilbur and Orville started tinkering around in Dayton and at Kitty Hawk, because I believe that two Wrights made a wrong.. This is the primary/original appearance in Ogden Nash’s own work: a poem published in The New Yorker’s print edition dated April 4, 1959 (the New Yorker page also shows 'March 28, 1959' metadata, but explicitly states 'Published in the print edition of the April 4, 1959, issue'). The commonly-circulated wording you quoted ('Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long') is a later paraphrase/variant; the original uses 'may' and 'went'. Other candidates (1) Whole School Progress the LAZY Way (Jim Smith, 2012) compilation95.0% ... progress might have been alright once , but it has gone on too long ' , as Ogden Nash once said , but learning wi... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Nash, Ogden. (2026, February 11). Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/progress-might-have-been-alright-once-but-it-has-29017/
Chicago Style
Nash, Ogden. "Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long." FixQuotes. February 11, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/progress-might-have-been-alright-once-but-it-has-29017/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long." FixQuotes, 11 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/progress-might-have-been-alright-once-but-it-has-29017/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
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