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.

Karl Marx

Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

Karl Marx

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

Jules Verne

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.

Julia Child

It's hard to imagine a civilization without onions; in one form or another their flavor blends into almost everything in the meal except the desert.

Julia Child

It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions.

Joseph Sobran

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

Oscar Wilde

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

Oscar Wilde

Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization.

Paul Gauguin

Civilization is what makes you sick.

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.