Civilization Quotes - Page 89

We are in the twilight of this earth. The societies and civilizations of human beings will not endure much longer because of their abuses of power.

Now, being a POW certainly doesn't qualify anyone to be president. But it does reveal character. This is the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of history have sought in their leaders.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

You cannot organize civilization around the core of militarism and at the same time expect reason to control human destinies.

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.

To a great extent the achievements of invention, of mechanical and of artistic creation, must of necessity, and rightly, be individual rather than governmental. It is the self-reliant pioneer in every enterprise who beats the path along which American civilization has marched. Such individual effort is the glory of America.

Movies are to our civilization what dreams and ideals are to individual lives: They express the mystery and help define the nature of who we are and what we are becoming.

Unless man has the wit and the grit to build his civilization on something better than material power, it is surely idle to talk of plans for a stable peace.

The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one.

Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.

It's one of the bases of all human existence - the relation between parents and children, whether biologically or metaphorically. It's something we can never get away from, even in a civilization where we're controlled by robots. It's the basic relationship between mature people who represent paternal and maternal figures and young people. It's universal - it's part of human existence. It's always been that way, and it will always be that way if humans remain around.

One of the biggest problems of our contemporary civilization is that there's been an interruption of transmission. People have no past in their present.

Baroque civilization believed in two truths, which for a post-18th-century mindset are exclusive truths - we have to eliminate one to believe the other. They believed in the rational exploration of the universe, and they also believed that there was a hidden spiritual truth. Baroque thinkers were able to live the two at the same time. In any case, for me, it's necessary to live that way also.

The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.

Opportunity can't reward you with its many gifts if you fail to recognize it and act on it. What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made from the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one. Let the good times roll!

The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

I would seriously question whether anybody is really foolish enough to really say what they mean. Sometimes I think that civilization as we know it would kind of break down if we all were completely honest.

Whatever oppressions man has suffered, they have invariably fallen more heavily on woman. Whatever new liberties advancing civilization has brought to man, ever the smallest measure has been accorded to woman, as a result of church teaching. The effect of this is seen in every department of life.

If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.

Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.

In a state of nature, the weakest go to the wall; in a state of over-refinement, both the weak and the strong go to the gutter.

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.

Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.

We don't have a great clash of civilizations, a clash of ideologies, a clash of alternative models, where governments thought to themselves, if we go too far, if we sort of trample unreasonably on rights, we'll give birth to a political movement which will cost us our credibility, and will possibly cost us our offices, because people will vote for the other team, the other guys.