Famous Quotes & Sayings

Reynolds Price

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

Reinhold Niebuhr

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.

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.

Mary Douglas

I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good.

Pope Benedict XVI

Civilization is now under the tyranny of relativism.

Pope John Paul II

This is why moral uneasiness is destined to become even more acute. It is obvious that a fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery is at the root of contemporary economics and materialistic civilization, which does not allow the human family to break free from such radically unjust situations.

Pope John Paul II

Side by side with the miseries of underdevelopment...we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissable. This superdevelopment consists in an excessive availability of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups and makes people slaves of "possession" and immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the civilization of consumption, or "consumerism," which involves so much throwing away and waste.

Phillip Adams

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

Primo Levi

Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.

Pliny the Elder

Our civilization depends largely on paper.

Victor Hugo

Revolution is the larva of civilization.

Victor Hugo

The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.

Vernon Lee

Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

Thomas P. Campbell

We live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and ... it's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations that we're seeing the current manifestations of.

Thomas Paine

Civilization, or that which is so called, has operated two ways to make one part of society more affluent and the other part more wretched than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

Thomas E. Mann

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

Timothy Leary

Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.

Timothy Leary

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Thomas Sowell

Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.

Thomas Sowell

The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.

Thomas Sowell

If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are frustrating in innumerable ways. Yet those with the vision of the anointed often see these constraints as only arbitrary impositions, things from which they-and we all-can be 'liberated.' The social disintegration which has followed in the wake of such liberation has seldom provoked any serious reconsideration of the whole set of assumptions-the vision-which led to such disasters. That vision is too well insulated from feedback.

Thomas Sowell

Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get reelected.

Thomas Sowell

Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.

Thomas Sowell

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Saul Alinsky

Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.

Roger Ebert

The purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize with other people... For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

Robert M. Hutchins

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death

Richard Rorty

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

Rodney Stark

... All questions concerning the rise of Christianity are one: How was it done? How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization? Although this is the only question, it requires many answers - no one thing led to the triumph of Christianity.

Robinson Jeffers

civilization is a transient sickness.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.

Samuel Johnson

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.