Famous Quotes & Sayings

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I'd like - inviting aliens and have them observe what we do because so much of what we do that we take for granted will just be weird or extraordinary or just plain dumb when observed by an alien from another civilization.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

FM signals and those of broadcast television...travel out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing).

Neil Gaiman

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.

Neil Gaiman

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

Mark Steyn

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?

Marilyn French

My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.

Nick Bostrom

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

Mercy Otis Warren

The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization.

Theodore Roosevelt

Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny.

Theodore Dreiser

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Margaret Sanger

Organized charity itself is. . . the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents

Margaret Sanger

As an advocate of birth control I wish to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

Margaret Mitchell

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.

Margaret Mitchell

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.

Margaret Mead

Because our civilization is woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas which any one group accepts will be found to contain numerous contradictions.

Margaret Mead

I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?

Marcus Garvey

I pray God that we shall never use our physical prowess to oppress the human race, but we will use our strength, physically, morally and otherwise to preserve humanity and civilization.

Marcus Garvey

If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.

Ray Bradbury

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Ray Bradbury

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Ray Bradbury

Without the library, you have no civilization.

James F. Cooper

If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves.

Henry A. Kissinger

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized . So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

Henry A. Kissinger

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.

Henry George

We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit.

Henry George

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.

Patricia Briggs

Civilization is vastly overrated.

Lance Morrow

Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram.

John Ralston Saul

A commercial civilization is money-oriented, profit-oriented. Commercial values always tend to wrench a society free of tradition.Economics from education to public service is being reorganized on the self-destructive basis of self-interest.

John Ralston Saul

The best defence [for a democracy, for the public good] is aggressiveness, the aggressiveness of the involved citizen. We need to reassert that slow, time-consuming, inefficient, boring process that requires our involvement; it is called 'being a citizen.' The public good is not something that you can see. It is not static. It is a process. It is the process by which democratic civilizations build themselves.

James Joyce

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

James Hansen

Burning all the fossil fuels will destroy the planet we know, Creation, the planet of stable climate in which civilization developed.