“Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.”

Source: Les Misérables

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 130
Context: I have not read Nietzsche or Ibsen, nor any other philosopher, and have not needed to do it, and have not desired to do it; I have gone to the fountain-head for information—that is to say, to the human race. Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race. I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born; I knew I should not find a single original thought in any philosophy, and I knew I could not furnish one to the world myself, if I had five centuries to invent it in. Nietzsche published his book, and was at once pronounced crazy by the world—by a world which included tens of thousands of bright, sane men who believed exactly as Nietzsche believed, but concealed the fact, and scoffed at Nietzsche. What a coward every man is! and how surely he will find it out if he will just let other people alone and sit down and examine himself. The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

Αs translated by William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889), Vol. I, Lecture IV, p. 188.
The Vocation of the Scholar (1794)
Context: Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also. And he who hinders this, —what character does he assume towards his age and posterity? Louder than with a thousand voices, by his actions he proclaims into the deafened ear of the world present and to come —"As long as I live at least, the men around me shall not become wiser or better; — for in their progress I too, notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, should be dragged forward in some direction; and this I detest I will not become more enlightened, — I will not become nobler. Darkness and perversion are my elements, and I will summon all my powers together that I may not be dislodged from them."

In "Wages are Going Lower!" (1951), William Joseph Baxter wrote, "One might almost say that the human race seems to have improved everything except people." Variations of this quote have appeared since both with and without attribution to Adlai Stevenson, but no documented connection to Stevenson is known.
Misattributed

Source: The Book Of Counted Sorrows

Rainforests and the Timeless Metaphors of Dreams by Manav Gupta (August 1997)
"on my eyot, umbilical cords of earth" by Manav Gupta (May 1999)
One minute films on environment consciousness (Commissioned by the Govt. of India) (2005)
1990s

Science and Humanism (1951)

Perfidy
Books

Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information