Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Eckhart Tolle

Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it?

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.

Mahatma Gandhi

Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.

James Norman Hall

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

James Lovelock

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

Joe Rogan

Our entire civilization is built on a foundation of unfixable bullshit.

Jimi Hendrix

With any new civilization... they have to have their own officers and police and governments and all that.

John Banville

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

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

Joseph Pilates

Civilization impairs physical fitness.

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.

Northrop Frye

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

Orson Welles

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

Oriana Fallaci

The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.