Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Caleb Colton

A semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.

Alan Bennett

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

John Wilson

We want to send a very strong message ... this is not what we expect out of civilized society, ... We're going to make an example of somebody.

David Mitchell

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

David Graeber

It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.

David Suzuki

More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.

Cesare Pavese

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.

David Mitchell

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

David Korten

An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.

Dave Barry

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Camille Paglia

There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.

C. L. R. James

Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.

George Hecht

We value this historic property so much and we don't want to tear up more of it than we have to.

Ken Mehlman

We are at a very historic moment in terms of the party, but also our community.

Ai Weiwei

No matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy,

Arnold J. Toynbee

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff - well, it might as well be dead.

Shia LaBeouf

When people ask me about my story, I just go through the positive stuff: the tent-pole moments, the big landmark checkpoints.

Stuart Eizenstat

has the potential to rank ... as a landmark event.

Mike Leavitt

It is a triumph for collaborative science, ... This is a landmark achievement.

Minya Oh

It was a landmark for the hip-hop generation.

Kerry Killinger

This is a landmark day for Washington Mutual and for our industry,

Alan Ball

I need to feel like the work I'm doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated.

Al Oerter

Competition in its best form is a test of self. It has nothing to do with medals. The winner is the person who gets the most out of themselves.

Al Seckel

I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society.

Chogyam Trungpa

The basic wisdom of Shambhala is that in this world, as it is, we can find a good and meaningful human life that will also serve others. That is our true richness.

Chip Conley

What one thing can you start counting today that will actually be meaningful in your life?

Dave Chappelle

You've got to say 'yes' to your destiny. Life's happening right now, look around you. There goes some life. Come on, Mamma, live!

David Guterson

Fiction is socially meaningful.

Dave Barry

I always assumed that at some point I would have to quit making jokes, get a real job and do something meaningful and productive that would actually benefit society. Fortunately this never happened.

David Suchet

I can't try to convert anybody. It's not in me to do that. But my faith has given me such an appreciation of people and meaningful relationships, and a world view which I didn't have before. And although I will fail every day, it gives me something to aspire to.

C. L. R. James

I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.

Bryan Clay

I'm excited to be a part of the Olympic movement again.

Frank Newport

There are debates, there are ads, and all that stuff so you're going to have movements up and down.

Cecily Brown

I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting.

David Walker

We have to get some movement on it shortly,

Bob Harper

CrossFit is all about constantly-varied, high-intensity movements. And to do these movements, you have to have a certified coach to take you through this - or any type of physical activity.

Harry Shum, Jr.

When it comes to acting, you really have to create movement which in some ways is dancing. And dancing, I feel is very important to act as well. I wouldn't put one over the other.

Arundhati Roy

I am a Maoist sympathiser. I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism.

Irfan Pathan

The pitch had a lot of moisture on it. There was a lot of movement off the wicket, more than there was in the air.

Bill O'Reilly

Gross negligence in handling national security is a felony.

Lee Melchionni

Whenever you can be a part of something where the number one team and number two team are playing each other on national television, it is special. How many people get that opportunity?

Russ Knocke

We were already operating under the National Response Plan.

Michael W. Smith

I sang at the Inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral.

John Wilhelm

We've become persuaded that, after two years of trying to reform the national AFL-CIO, it is unwilling to change,

LenDale White

We're back-to-back national champions. You can't spell BCS without USC.

LenDale White

We're back-to-back national champions, ... I know you can't spell BCS without USC.

Vladimir Putin

Russian democracy is the power of the Russian people with their own traditions of national self-government, and not the realisation of standards foisted on us from outside.

Kofi Annan

What governments and people don't realise is that sometimes the collective interest - the international interest - is also the national interest.

Charles Dickens

I'm awful dull, but I hope I've beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!

David Shapiro

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to assume that their president, hostile to the principles that formed the nation and determined to act with malice toward its inhabitants by suppressing their rights and enabling its enemies to prosper in their attempts to destroy it, must be confronted, a rational response for the nation is to encumber itself no more with such a president and reject his authority and the acolytes who carry out his wishes.

David McCullough

You have to have wisdom and knowledge as well as virtue to preserve your rights and liberties.

David Korten

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

Catherine Ashton

In the EU you have half a billion people who share a common belief in democracy, in rights, in the kind of economic life we want.

Madeleine Albright

Our strategic dialogue with China can both protect American interests and uphold our principles, provided we are honest about our differences on human rights and other issues and provided we use a mix of targeted incentives and sanctions to narrow these differences.

Ai Weiwei

For all the tough talk about China during the presidential debates, Romney and Obama evaded any mention of China's suspect human rights record, corruption, and rule of law. By not tackling these controversial topics, the candidates are protecting a strategic partnership with China at the expense of essential human values and beliefs.

Ai Weiwei

Liberty is about our rights to question everything.

Bob Menendez

We should seek international support for our mutual objectives abroad, in promoting freedom, democracy, respect for human rights, and also the elimination of weapons of mass destruction.

David Mamet

The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.

Tony Morris

We wanted it to be local. We wanted it to be symbolic of our own difficulties in life.

Bill Schneider

Now I think New York is symbolic of the nation's division.

Wolfgang Bosbach

It would be a symbolic contribution, not compensation.

Stephanie Bennett

It was a symbolic need for us to be out front, because it was our kid,

Rene Magritte

People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.

Charles Caleb Colton

For what are the triumphs of war, planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? The means are the sacrifice of many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few.

Charles Caleb Colton

War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.

Charles Caleb Colton

Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun, the hand that warned Belshazzar derived its horrifying effect from the want of a body.

Charles Caleb Colton

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

Charles Caleb Colton

Wars are to the body politic, what drams are to the individual. There are times when they may prevent a sudden death, but if frequently resorted to, or long persisted in, they heighten the energies only to hasten the dissolution.

Charles Dickens

Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?

Charles Dickens

I believe that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty's head will be dealt by this nation in the ultimate failure of its example to the earth.

Charles Stross

There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet?

Charles Stross

I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.