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.

Leonard Boswell

Our nation was founded on the principals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Ehren Kruger

One of the difficult things of making a horror sequel in general is because the horror genre is so founded on surprise.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

Ryan Holmes

The decision to leave a company you founded and move on to a new project is never an easy one.

Edmund Burke

Frugality is founded on the principle that all riches have limits

Mohamed ElBaradei

There is no religion that was founded on intolerance - and no religion that does not value the sanctity of human life.

Aaron Patzer

In the first three years of Mint, from when it was founded to when it was sold, I can honestly say that in a sustainable way, I couldn't have worked any harder on it.

Bill Bryson

In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.'

Niklas Zennstrom

We were founded on Aug. 29, 2003, and now have 70 employees, about half in London and half in Tallinn, Estonia, and some in Luxembourg.

David McCullough

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

David McCullough

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

C. Wright Mills

History is the shank of the social sciences.

Cesare Pavese

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Cary Grant

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

E. Hicks

When you think about it, history is made to be broken. That's the way we look at it.

Kurt Vonnegut

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Kurt Vonnegut

History! Read it and weep!

Edward Gibbon

But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

Steve Squyres

We're not going to take any risks. It's a big crater in terms of diameter, but really shallow. It's nothing like Endurance.

Willis Reed

We would still have been here if we could have come to terms with the union.

Robert Kazinsky

There are always things you wish you could've done better, and there are always things that you wish would've turned out a different way in terms of storyline, which you're not in charge of.

Lars Larsen

I never think in terms of gold, currency, diamonds. I'm not clever enough for that.

Steven Patrick Morrissey

For me to think in terms of employing security seems ostentatious.

H. L. Mencken

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

Craig Venter

Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.

Hallie Ephron

Everyone thinks when they start writing that they can't do it. I was lucky. My sister Delia was the most important person in terms of encouraging me.

Al Pacino

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

Alan Rickman

Los Angeles is not a town full of airheads. There's a great deal of wonderful energy there.

Charles Kuralt

You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

Beau Bridges

As an actor, I travel around a lot and live in a lot of hotels, and many times I've been in a town where the only entertainment to be had is what you find in the hotel bar or lobby.

Ben Bernanke

I come from Main Street, from a small town that's really depressed.

Amanda Walker

With no students, the town is pretty quiet.

Hannah Baldwin

We're just a little town that did things that were unheard of at the time.

Barbara Kingsolver

It's tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you.

Charles Bukowski

I broke that town in half like a wooden match.

Edward Abbey

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

Diane Abbott

Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.

Brian Johnson

Where I lived, it was a cold mining place, a village called Dunston. The only time you saw a Rolls-Royce was when somebody died.

Adolph Green

I had met a young lady who wanted to be in the theater. It was Judy Holliday. She had somehow fallen down the steps of the Village Vanguard, which still exists today.

H. Hunt

I'd like to see them do more of this so we don't have to go to Cocoa Village all the time.

Daniel Defoe

Manchester, one of the greatest, if not really the greatest mere village in England.

Bidzina Ivanishvili

Since the whole village was poor, we didnt realize our own poverty. I was happy.

Mahatma Gandhi

The collectors of revenue and the policeman are the only symbols by which millions in India's villages know British rule.

Mahatma Gandhi

There is no better way of industrializing the villages of India than the spinning wheel.

John Berger

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

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.