Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Wilson

We want to send a very strong message ... this is not what we expect out of civilized society, ... We're going to make an example of somebody.

Antonio Tabucchi

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

Jacques Barzun

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

William Shakespeare

The thorny point Of bare distress hath ta'en from me the show Of smooth civility; yet am I inland bred And know some nurture.

Mark Helprin

I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation.

Bill Nye

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.

Bertrand Russell

To us it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but this is a narrow view.

Agnes Repplier

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Agnes Repplier

English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.

Charles Dickens

The memories which peaceful country scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the graves of those we loved: may purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.

Charles Dickens

All is going on as it was wont. The waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds go forth upon their trackless flight; the white arms beckon, in the moonlight, to the invisible country far away.

Charles Dickens

To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things - but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature.

Charles Dickens

In love of home, the love of country has its rise.

Charles Stewart Parnell

No man has the right to say to his country

Charles Stewart Parnell

No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country - thus far shalt thou go and no further.

Charles Sturt

Yet, upon the whole, the space I traversed is unlikely to become the haunt of civilized man, or will only become so in isolated spots, as a chain of connection to a more fertile country; if such a country exist to the westward.

Alan Paton

There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.

Alan Moore

In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing.

Charles Dickens

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Charles Studd

For five years we never went outside our doors without a volley of curses from our neighbours.

Alanis Morissette

I'm a leave-the-bathroom-door-open nudist, which is sometimes disconcerting for my friends.

Alan Moore

Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away…forever." The Joker

Chinua Achebe

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

Edith Wharton

But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

Eddie Izzard

I can go from blokey to girlie in 15 minutes and then I'm out the door. But that's the fastest I can do it. Becoming a woman takes work.

David Icke

Humanity is at a fork in the road and we can no longer stand there staring at the map pondering which direction to take. It is hardly a choice, after all. One Road leads to a global fascist dictatorship that would control every aspect of our lives, including our thoughts. The other will open the door to freedom and potential on a scale never experienced in the 'world' as we have known it. Hard one, isn't it? A choice between a prison and a paradise?

Derek Jacobi

They were totally supportive, always saw everything I did. One of the thrills of my life was when they went to the theater to see something that I wasn't in. It opened doors for them that otherwise would have been totally closed.

Denise Monteiro

We don't know why they were fleeing New York.

Jeff Goodell

Without electrons, there is no Google. And without clean electrons, there will be no Google customers, since we'll all be too busy fleeing from rising seas, droughts, and disease.

David Eagleman

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

Sean Penn

My greatest interest in it was certainly not to avoid those things that were going to be controversial about the family but the interest I had in the story was predominantly what he was pursuing and not as much what he was fleeing.

Karl Kraus

Satire chooses and knows no objects. It arises by fleeing from them and their forcing themselves upon it.

Umberto Eco

You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.

David Hume

Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.

Benazir Bhutto

What is not recorded is not remembered.

Kurt Vonnegut

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Kurt Vonnegut

History! Read it and weep!

Agnes Repplier

History is not written in the interests of morality.

Agnes Repplier

History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.

Agnes Repplier

If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.

Charles Manson

If you're going to do something, do it well. And leave something witchy.

Billy Wilder

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Bill Richardson

I'm not a big believer in doing things unilaterally. I'm a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make something work for all people.

Bill Vickroy

We're just selling tickets for the opening sessions for all these games.

Dave Wannstedt

With us, everything is sort of new, from a personnel standpoint. Simonitis is really the only one that was in the lineup on Opening Day a year ago.

Beth Macmillan

They said not only would they like to sponsor it, but they would like to have it on site as part of their opening ceremonies.

Ted Shaw

Things went as I expected. I think Roberts's opening statement was eloquent. I've seen him in court. But the question for me is who is he.

Jane Hirshfield

There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.

Al Gore

...it is appropriate to have an over representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

Bridget Riley

In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, the painting 'took place.' Then, little by little, and to some extent deliberately, I made it go the other way, opening up an interior space... so that there was a layered, shallow depth.

David Rakoff

I will forever be grateful to my oncologist for opening the door and saying, 'Damn it, the tumor's 10 percent bigger,' before he even said hello.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.

Charles Dickens

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon.

Charles Dickens

Some people are nobody's enemies but their own

Charles Studd

Had I cared for the comments of people, I should never have been a missionary.

Charles Stross

In general, a little controversy isn't harmful: if anything, it gets people interested.

Charles Stanley

I certainly respect other people's opinions, but I would not vote for a woman to be the pastor of a church.

Charles Spurgeon

The Lord's people have always been a waiting people.

Charles Spurgeon

People will not receive the balm of the gospel unless they know something of the wounds that sin has made.

Chris Colfer

I don't necessarily consider myself a virgin, probably because I have such a penetrating personality

Edward Hopper

Methods are transient: personality is enduring.

Arnold Newman

It seems to me that no one picture can ever be a final summation of a personality. There are so many facets in every human being that it is impossible to present them all in one photograph.

Alan Sugar

Effective leadership is about earning respect, and it's also about personality and charisma

Charlotte Bronte

Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.

Chester Himes

There is an indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed; a face deep within the human personality that is impregnable to all assaults.

Charlotte Gainsbourg

I didn't want to change my personality onstage, but I still had to build some kind of ego to be able to go up there. If not, there's no point.

Chanel Iman

I don't want to be known as the black model. I want to be recognized as Chanel Iman, a personality.

Bill Maher

A cult is a cult, and that's what a frat is. A place where they strip you of your personality and rebuild it in their image.

Charles Caleb Colton

War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.

Alan Watts

We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives. As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves. The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow; the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot

Alan Moore

Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out.

Alan Moore

They say we have we created the man to end all wars; I say we have created a man to end all worlds.

Alan Moore

Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.

Alan Greenspan

The Iraq War is largely about oil.

Alan Greenspan

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

Alan Greenspan

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

Alan Colmes

I still believe that the Democrats have it right about health care, education, the war in Iraq and, yes the war on terror.