Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Leo Tolstoy

But that's just the aim of civilization - to make everything a source of enjoyment.

Larry Niven

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

Pearl S. Buck

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

Peter Thiel

The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level.

Peter Fonda

Civilization has always been a bust.

Peter Scott

Every bride and groom in the history of civilization has gained weight after their wedding day. It is only a matter of time until archaeologists unearth a married caveman who's wearing a pair of old tux pants that were so tight he couldn't get the zipper closed.

Pete Hegseth

As the publisher of the 'Tory,' I strive to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.

Phylicia Rashad

Historically, if you look at great civilizations, why do they crumble? Is it because of what's outside or because of something internal? It's always internal. It is.

Madame de Stael

The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

Haruki Murakami

Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?

Haruki Murakami

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.

John Maynard Keynes

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.

John Malkovich

Some people die before their time so that others can live. It's a cornerstone of civilization.

John Lothrop Motley

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

John Banville

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

Judith Martin

The family dinner table is the cornerstone of civilization and those who 'graze' from refrigerators or in front of the television sets are doomed to remain in a state of savagery.

Karel Capek

The sole perfection which modern civilization attains is a mechanical one; machines are splendid and flawless, but the life which serves them or is served by them, is neither superb nor brilliant, nor more perfect nor more graceful; nor is the work of the machines perfect; only they, the machines, are like gods.

Joseph de Maistre

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Kate Millett

When one group rules another, the relationship between the two is political. When such an arrangement is carried out over a long period of time it develops an ideology (feudalism, racism, etc.). All historical civilizations are patriarchies: their ideology is male supremacy.

Joseph Pilates

Civilization impairs physical fitness.

Julius Nyerere

Having come into contact with a civilization which has over-emphasized the freedom of the individual, we are in fact faced with one of the big problems of Africa in the modern world. Our problem is just this: how to get the benefits of European society - benefits that have been brought about by an organization based upon the individual - and yet retain African's own structure of society in which the individual is a member of a kind of fellowship.

Oswald Spengler

Fortunately, at the last hour, there were always a few soldiers to save Civilization.

Paul Davies

We could tell them [alien civilization] things that we have discovered in the realm of mathematical physics, but there is stuff that I would like to know. There are some famous problems like how to bring gravitation and quantum physics together, the long-sought-after theory of quantum gravity. But it may be hard to understand the answer that comes back.