Famous Quotes & Sayings

Tom Robbins

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

Tom Robbins

Virtually every advancement made by our species since civilization first peeked out of its nest of stone has been initiated by lone individuals, mavericks who more often than not were ignored, mocked, or viciously persecuted by society and its institutions.

Vaclav Havel

We are the first atheistic and global, all-embracing civilization. You cannot tell whether you are sitting at an airport in Hong Kong or in a hotel in Alaska. Everything is instrumentalized, subjected to a short-term purpose. It is quite possible that in such a situation any sense of a deeper meaning gets lost.

Vaclav Havel

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies.

Steven Pinker

For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

Steven Weinberg

Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion, should be done and may, in fact, in the end, be our greatest contribution to civilization.

Sydney J. Harris

Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in 'getting things done' is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.

Scott Westerfeld

Maybe they didn't want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away all that's left is some story in a history class.

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.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no 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.

Stephen Gardiner

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

Stephen Gardiner

The Industrial Revolution was another one of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.

Stephen Fry

Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it's an endless stalemate.

Rutherford B. Hayes

One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals.

Ruth Benedict

Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known.

Ruth Benedict

Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.

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.

Yoko Ono

We created a thing called culture and civilization, and now we're about to lose it because we're trying to destroy everything. And I kind of miss it. I miss culture and civilization.