Famous Quotes & Sayings

Andre Gide

Prejudices are the props of civilization.

Alvin Toffler

By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.

Alvin Toffler

Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.

Alvin Toffler

One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.

Chuck Palahniuk

Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.

Chuck Klosterman

Cars are the most central thing in America, in a lot of ways. They've probably influenced the way we live more than anything else, and yet every really big problem - whether it's the environment or who dictates the international economy because of oil - is all tied to cars. Ultimately, cars are bad for civilization. I don't know if they'll end us.

Andrew Carnegie

The worlds civilization started from the day on which everyone received reward for labour.

Andrew Carnegie

Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends-the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.

Alvar Aalto

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

Alva Myrdal

The world generally speaking is now drifting on a more and more devastating course towards the absurd target of extermination - or rather, to be more exact - of the northern hemisphere's towns, fields, and the people who have developed our civilization.

Alva Myrdal

The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.

Andre Malraux

Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.

Andre Maurois

Learning is nothing without cultivated manners, but when the two are combined in a woman, you have one of the most exquisite products of civilization.

Ambrose Bierce

An immaterial but visible being that inhabited the air when the air was an element and before it was fatally polluted with factory smoke, sewer gas and similar products of civilization.

Ambrose Bierce

NOISE, n. A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.

Allen Ginsberg

The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the biggest false God, Jehovah, in middle of western civilization.

Allan Bloom

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

Ann Coulter

You will find liberals always rooting for savages against civilization.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.

Booker T. Washington

The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much the problem of what you will do with Negro, as what the Negro will do with you and your 'civilization'.

Edmund Hillary

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a yeti.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization simply fail to exist in the first place.

David Wallace

Civilization no longer needs to open up wilderness; it needs wilderness to help open up the still largely unexplored human mind.

David Brin

Every marvel of our age arose out of the critical give and take of an open society. No other civilization ever managed to incorporate this crucial innovation, weaving it into daily life. And if you disagree with this... say so!

David Brooks

If I had to fault President [Barack] Obama, I would say that sometimes governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.

August Bebel

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization.

August Bebel

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization. It has kept mankind in slavery and oppression. The Church and the State have always fraternally united to exploit the people.

Arnold J. Toynbee

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back.... its triumphal march is the progress of civilization.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been.

Edgar Mitchell

We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.

Edgar Mitchell

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.