Famous Quotes & Sayings

R. D. Laing

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

R. C. Sproul

We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization.

Poul Anderson

In my considered opinion, the profit to be made by permanent settlement in space is nothing less than the survival of industrial civilization, and therefore the survival of nearly the entire human race, along with such amenities as peace, freedom, enough to eat, and the chance to reach a high age in good health.

Pierre Schaeffer

Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?

Pierre Schaeffer

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

Niall Ferguson

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

Niall Ferguson

The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

John Ashcroft

A calculated, malignant, devastating evil has arisen in our world, ... Civilization cannot ignore the wrongs that have been done. America will not tolerate their being repeated. Justice has a new mission, a new calling against an old evil.

Margaret Thatcher

Terrorism thrives on a free society. The terrorist uses the feelings in a free society to sap the will of civilization to resist. If the terrorist succeeds, he has won and the whole of free society has lost.

Mark Twain

The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey!

L. Neil Smith

Just as liberalism is the main force that drives conservatism and maintains its popularity in some quarters, conservatism is the reason liberalism continues to enjoy the traction that it does in our poor civilization.

P. J. O'Rourke

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

Oscar Wilde

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

Oscar Wilde

Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.

Oscar Wilde

Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.

Mary Baker Eddy

Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.

Mark McKinnon

If we cannot come together to pause, to respect our dead and the heroic lives of meaning they led, then ours is truly a civilization lost.

Mark Twain

Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?

Mark Twain

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

Mark Twain

If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a paper which fails to show up one or more members & beneficiaries of our Civilization as promenading with his shirt-tail up & the rest of his regalia in the wash.

Mark Twain

My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.

Mark Twain

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

John Green

When people have to choose between civilization and warm genitals, they choose warm genitals

P. J. O'Rourke

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

Paul Bowles

[A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.

Michael Nesmith

The only people who steal are thieves, and that's a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will... return the benefit and reciprocate.

Christopher Hitchens

The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

Christopher Dawson

This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other

Christopher Dawson

Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.

Havelock Ellis

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

Havelock Ellis

There is nothing more fragile than civilization.

Havelock Ellis

There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.

Hayao Miyazaki

It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime.