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.

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 Ciardi

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.

John Ciardi

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.

John Buchan

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

John Cheever

For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.

John Boyd Orr

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

John Boyd Orr

Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.

John Amery

That is why I come forward tonight without any political label, without any bias, but just simply as an Englishman to say to you: a crime is being committed against civilization.

Daphne Guinness

You can tell the state of civilization by the way people dress. If the people who fought two World Wars came back to 2010 and saw all of us running around in tracksuits, what would they think? It is just about being sloppy.

Will Rogers

You can't say that civilization don't advance; for in every war they kill you a new way.

Matthew Arnold

English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.

Meg Rosoff

Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

Max Born

Science?is so greatly opposed to history and tradition that it cannot be absorbed by our civilization.

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 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.

Rebecca West

Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

Rose Macaulay

what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?

Rose Macaulay

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

Tryon Edwards

No true civilization can be expected permanently to continue which is not based on the great principles of Christianity.

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.