Famous Quotes & Sayings

Frank Herbert

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

H. G. Wells

When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.

H. G. Wells

Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

Jay Roach

There's people who actually have a whole science devoted to what makes a sticky meme and that idea of that question of why some ideas about how civilizations work catch on and others don't.

Jasper Johns

That's what painting does; it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization.

Karl Marx

Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

Karl Marx

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

Jules Verne

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.

Julia Child

It's hard to imagine a civilization without onions; in one form or another their flavor blends into almost everything in the meal except the desert.

Julia Child

It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions.

Molly Ivins

California is now close to spending more on prisons than it does on higher education - surely the death warrant of a civilization.

Milton Friedman

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

H. G. Wells

Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.

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.

Honore de Balzac

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

Erich Fromm

Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.

Jawaharlal Nehru

If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.

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.

Evelyn Waugh

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

J. B. Priestley

The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor ... If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please.

Irving Howe

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Irving Babbitt

The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.

Lois Wyse

Survival must come before civilization.

Lytton Strachey

When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved.

John F. Kennedy

This knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for all of the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself. But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.

John F. Kennedy

I look forward to an america in which commands respect throughout the world, not only for its strength, but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world in which we will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.

Jonas Mekas

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

Paul Levinson

Now, more than ever, we need people in space... The events of September 11 show us how vulnerable we and our civilization are down here on Earth... So let us use our strength, our awareness of mortality as a civilization, to do something truly lasting and earth-shaking for humanity. Let us join with the peoples and cultures of this planet, the diversities of its perspectives and religions and science, so we can leave it-not behind, but as a springboard to something better.

Paul Valery

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.