Famous Quotes & Sayings

Oscar Wilde

Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization.

Paul Gauguin

Civilization is what makes you sick.

John Green

When people have to choose between civilization and warm genitals, they choose warm genitals

P. J. O'Rourke

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

Paul Bowles

[A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.

Marisa Tomei

In cultural history, the civil rights movement came before the women's movement.

Naguib Mahfouz

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

R. D. Laing

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

R. C. Sproul

We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization.

Poul Anderson

In my considered opinion, the profit to be made by permanent settlement in space is nothing less than the survival of industrial civilization, and therefore the survival of nearly the entire human race, along with such amenities as peace, freedom, enough to eat, and the chance to reach a high age in good health.

Pierre Schaeffer

Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?

Pierre Schaeffer

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

Niall Ferguson

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

Niall Ferguson

The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

Newt Gingrich

ACLU has become eccentric and destructive.

Newt Gingrich

NEA includes most bizarre & extreme misuse of tax funds.

John Ashcroft

A calculated, malignant, devastating evil has arisen in our world, ... Civilization cannot ignore the wrongs that have been done. America will not tolerate their being repeated. Justice has a new mission, a new calling against an old evil.

Honore de Balzac

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

He called to thank me for teaching him what I taught him in order to be able to do what he did at the restaurant. It was just incredible. And as an instructor you can't get a better compliment than that, when somebody in the civilian world takes what they learn in a four-hour C.P.R. class and actually uses it to save someone's life.

Jesse Jackson

He put forth an anti-Rosa Parks judge. ... Just maybe, we need a White House conference on civil rights.

Huston Smith

It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.

Huston Smith

It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.

Gene Cernan

I've been asked about UFOs and I've said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization.

Jerry Brown

Okay, so what we really have to recognize and own as Americans is that our way of being is itself perhaps the greatest threat to the continuation of civilization.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

All of us confront limits of body, talent, temperament. But that is not all. We are, all of us, also constrained by our time, our place, our civilization.

Frank Herbert

Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.

L. Neil Smith

Just as liberalism is the main force that drives conservatism and maintains its popularity in some quarters, conservatism is the reason liberalism continues to enjoy the traction that it does in our poor civilization.

P. J. O'Rourke

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

Oscar Wilde

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

Oscar Wilde

Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.

Oscar Wilde

Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.

Herbert Croly

The American economic, political, and social organization has given to its citizens the benefits of material prosperity, political liberty, and a wholesome natural equality; and this achievement is a gain, not only to Americans, but to the world and to civilization.

Herbert Read

We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.