Famous Quotes & Sayings

Patrick Stewart

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.

Mark Steyn

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?

Marilyn French

My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.

Nick Bostrom

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

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.

Joseph Sobran

Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities.

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.

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.

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.

Mary Baker Eddy

Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.

Mark McKinnon

If we cannot come together to pause, to respect our dead and the heroic lives of meaning they led, then ours is truly a civilization lost.

Mark Twain

Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?

Mark Twain

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

Mark Twain

If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a paper which fails to show up one or more members & beneficiaries of our Civilization as promenading with his shirt-tail up & the rest of his regalia in the wash.

Mark Twain

My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.

Mark Twain

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

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.

Michael Nesmith

The only people who steal are thieves, and that's a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will... return the benefit and reciprocate.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is Love that will save our world and our civilization.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. ... If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

Nadine Gordimer

Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.

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.

Margaret Thatcher

Terrorism thrives on a free society. The terrorist uses the feelings in a free society to sap the will of civilization to resist. If the terrorist succeeds, he has won and the whole of free society has lost.