Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gro Harlem Brundtland

In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.

Golda Meir

Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.

Gregory David Roberts

Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.

Iain Banks

It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.

Hugo Chavez

I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet,

Howard Zinn

There was something horrifying in the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call 'civilization,' we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call 'nations' and armed to apprehend or kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Guy deBord

In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.

Marianne Williamson

Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related.

Hanna Rosin

For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy - enforced through the rights of the firstborn son - has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions.

George Bernard Shaw

Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head.

George Bernard Shaw

There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates , who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.

George Bernard Shaw

We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way.

George Bernard Shaw

I myself have been particularly careful never to say a civil word to the United States. I have scoffed at their inhabitants as a nation of villagers. I have defined the 100 % American as 99 % an idiot. And they adore me.

George Bernard Shaw

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

George Bernard Shaw

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

George Bernard Shaw

What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it,

George Bernard Shaw

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

George Bernard Shaw

The problem with the press is that they can't tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization.

Gary North

Karl Marx was the foremost hater and most incessant whiner in the history of Western Civilization. He was a spoiled, overeducated brat who never grew up; he just grew more shrill as he grew older. His lifelong hatred and whining have led to the deaths (so far) of perhaps a hundred million people, depending on how many people perished under Mao's tyranny. We will probably never know.

Erich Fromm

We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.

Thomas E. Mann

Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.

So what this is is a 'road novel.' Eventually entire civilization (in the South) had been uprooted and people found security only in movement, ... That interested me enormously ... A friend from New Orleans, he said when he read the book, 'This is like Hurricane Katrina.'

Rabindranath Tagore

The tendency in modern civilization is to make the world uniform... Let the mind be universal. The individual should not be sacrificed.

Hu Jintao

This victory saved human civilization and prevented a retrogression of history,

The roots of the problem lie with foreign policy rather than in society, civilization or American culture,

Shashi Tharoor

The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims.

Vince Lombardi

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Paul Johnson

Indeed it is the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical and self-correcting - not only in producing wealth but over the whole range of human activities - that constitutes its most decisive superiority over any of its rivals.

Amartya Sen

I loved that breadth, and also the fact that in interpreting Indian civilization itself, its cultural diversity was much emphasized.

To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

Jaron Lanier

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.

Jane McGonigal

We've been playing games since humanity had civilization - there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It's so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.