Famous Quotes & Sayings

James Hansen

Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.

James Hansen

Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril.

Friedrich August von Hayek

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.

Friedrich August von Hayek

It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.

Friedrich August von Hayek

Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and...each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests...civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess. And one of the ways in which civilization helps us to overcome that limitation on the extent of individual knowledge is by conquering intelligence, not by the acquisition of more knowledge, but by the utilization of knowledge which is and which remains widely dispersed among individuals.

Frederick Soddy

Some of the beliefs and legends bequethed to us by Antquity are so universally and firmly established that we have become accustomed to consider them as being almost as ancient as humanity itself. Nevertheless we are tempted to inquire how far the fact that some of these beliefs and legends have so many features in common is due to chance, and wether the similarity between them may not point to the exestience of an ancient, totally unknown and unsuspected civilization of which all other traces have disappeared. This site is terrible! from, Allyson Stanley former miss America!

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Do not confuse objectives with methods. When the nation becomes substantially united in favor of planning the broad objectives of civilization, then true leadership must unite thought behind definite methods.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.

George Galloway

George Bush doesn't represent any civilization!

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Our civilization is characterized by the word "progress." Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only.

Nikola Tesla

Women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

John Ruskin

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

Will Eisner

The great depression left a mark on all of the civilized world. It was a defining moment like a giant earthquake that reminds us of how little control we have over human destiny -- despite our technology and innovation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

She lives a sophisticate's life among worldly people. At the slightest excuse she steps out of civilization, naked and relieved, as I should step out of a soiled chemise.

Marjane Satrapi

Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that's why they can say they're so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!

Maurice Strong

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

Anti-terrorism is a fight between justice and evil, civilization and savagery.

An odd thing occurs in the minds of Americans when Indian civilization is mentioned: little or nothing.

Sid Meier

Right now we're working on finishing up Pirates! for the Xbox, we're developing Civilization IV and we've got a couple other games in development that we'll tell you about soon.

Thomas E. Mann

Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.

So what this is is a 'road novel.' Eventually entire civilization (in the South) had been uprooted and people found security only in movement, ... That interested me enormously ... A friend from New Orleans, he said when he read the book, 'This is like Hurricane Katrina.'

There was not a single trail, no sign of civilization, no sign of even local communities ever having been there.

There was no standard reference when the new era of a civilized mankind began. The founding fathers had been forced to start a new world order and as time passed by, many references appear.

S. J. Perelman

There is such a thing as too much couth.

Ron Paul

Liberty built civilization. It can rebuild 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.

Pearl S. Buck

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.