Famous Quotes & Sayings

Werner Herzog

There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.

Wallace Stegner

I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.

Samuel Smiles

This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.

W. G. Sebald

Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.

W. G. Sebald

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

W. H. Auden

Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

William Graham Sumner

The yearning after equality [in economic outcome] is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.

Thomas B. Macaulay

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

Raymond Loewy

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.

Victor Davis Hanson

The easily ridiculed, so-so status quo often hides Herculean efforts by those whom we take for granted, and who, working in the shadows, guarantee civilization instead of chaos.

S. J. Perelman

There is such a thing as too much couth.

Ron Paul

Liberty built civilization. It can rebuild civilization.

Storm Jameson

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.

Stewart Brand

Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

Stephen Spender

The only true hope for civilization-the conviction of the individual that his inner life can affect outward events and that, whether or not he does so he is responsible for them.

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.

Terence McKenna

So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.

Terence McKenna

The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.

Terence McKenna

And what we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization.

Terence McKenna

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Civilization depends on morality.

Shirin Ebadi

Human rights is the fruit of various civilizations.

Shirin Ebadi

Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization.

Shimon Peres

You know when civilization began? With the invention of the mirror.

Seth

In basic terms, civilization is dependent upon the spontaneity and fulfillment of the individual. Your civilization is in sad straits. Not because you are allowed spontaneity or fulfillment to individuals, but because you are denied it, and because your institutions are based upon that premise.