Famous Quotes & Sayings

Lois McMaster Bujold

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

Lyndon B. Johnson

A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.

Loren Eiseley

If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.

Malcolm Forbes

The richest person in the world - in fact. All the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library. You can measure the awareness, the breadth and the wisdom of a civilization, a nation, a people by the priority given to preserving these repositories of all that we are, all that we were, or will be.

Mahatma Gandhi

Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin.

Freya Stark

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

Northrop Frye

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

Orson Welles

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

Oriana Fallaci

The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

Octavia Butler

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

Octavio Paz

By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death

Octavio Paz

The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us

Emile M. Cioran

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

Emile M. Cioran

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

Ellen Lupton

Are some free fonts a gift to humanity rather than a blight on typographic civilization ?

Western civilization shapes the content of my films, provides me with subjects that haven't been used before.

Eric Schmidt

There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

I feel that I'm in a very interesting position, where I'm standing back to look at this change, at this moment in history of human beings. If the end of the civilization comes before the end of my life, that's lucky! I want to witness how this big story of humans ends.

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

Henry Rollins

When Black Flag and DOA and all those bands were touring in the early 80s, it was kind of a forest and you just kind of got your way through it. Now it's like a six lane highway with Starbucks every twenty meters. That's just civilization.

Hideki Tojo

Justice has nothing to do with victor nations and vanquished nations, but must be a moral standard that all the world's peoples can agree to. To seek this and to achieve it - that is true civilization

Henry Ward Beecher

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

Henry Ward Beecher

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

Helen Suzman

[To the South African parliament:] I do not know why we equate - and with the examples before us - a white skin with civilization.

John Henrik Clarke

The role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless... Islam was as guilty as all the rest.

John Henrik Clarke

The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa.

Richard Bach

Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love.

Ayn Rand

Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.

Bertrand Russell

From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary...

Bertrand Russell

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Benito Mussolini

A nation of spaghetti eaters cannot restore Roman civilization!