Famous Quotes & Sayings

Maurice Strong

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

John Henrik Clarke

The role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless... Islam was as guilty as all the rest.

John Henrik Clarke

The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa.

John Dos Passos

The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.

John Milius

A lot of people thought of me as a threat to Western civilization.

Johan Huizinga

Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.

Johan Huizinga

The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play....We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.

Jimmy Sangster

There are certain things for which civilization has no answer. But if you choose to meddle thus, then you must be prepared to facethe consequences, whatever they are.

George Leonard

It's fitting, then, that we begin this exploration of ourselves and of the world with music, and more specifically with a musical quality called vibrato. This pulsation that wells up within the sounded note can lead us to what is most spontaneous and creative in human life, and possibly even to deeper mysteries--to powers of knowing and doing which we have lost or given away during the epoch of civilization, and which perhaps we may now regain.

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.

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

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.

Lois McMaster Bujold

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

Lyndon B. Johnson

A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.

Loren Eiseley

If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.

Malcolm Forbes

The richest person in the world - in fact. All the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library. You can measure the awareness, the breadth and the wisdom of a civilization, a nation, a people by the priority given to preserving these repositories of all that we are, all that we were, or will be.

Mahatma Gandhi

Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin.

Freya Stark

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

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.