Civilization Quotes - Page 62

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

A world government with powers adequate to guarantee security is not a remote ideal for the distant future. It is an urgent necessity if our civilization is to survive.

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents

The real people who hold our civilization together are the maintenance people. If it weren't for them - pumping water out of subways, painting bridges to keep from rusting, fixing a steam pipe that is 70 years old - we'd be sunk. If we got rid of all the politicians and the policymakers in the world, the world would keep going. If you get rid of maintenance people, the whole thing breaks down.

We face the gravest threat that civilization has ever confronted. It's global in nature and requires a global solution. Increased CO2 emissions anywhere, whether from China or the United States or from one of the countries that is burning its forests like Brazil or Indonesia.

Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.

The legalized liquor business is the tragedy of our civilization. Alcohol is the greatest and most blighting curse of our modern civilization. The liquor seller is simply and only a privileged malefactor - a criminal.

Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.

History's villains are more easily recognized in retrospect. In an article published in 1935 and reprinted in 1937, Winston Churchill expressed a curious ambivalence towards the German chancellor prior to the outbreak of war: We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation. . . .

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.

Vanity as an impulse has without doubt been of far more benefit to civilization than modesty has ever been.

To serve Armenia is to serve civilization.

The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.

Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion.

Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

Civilization has taught us to eat with a fork, but even now if nobody is around we use our fingers.

There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

The easily ridiculed, so-so status quo often hides Herculean efforts by those whom we take for granted, and who, working in the shadows, guarantee civilization instead of chaos.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it.

Speech is civilization itself.

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.