Famous Quotes & Sayings

Al Gore

The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake.

Al Gore

The consensus is clear. We need an immediate and determined shift to a clean, renewable economy. The continued mass burning of fossil fuels is inconsistent with a healthy, prosperous future for our civilization.

Al Gore

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

Charles A. Beard

Technological civilization... rests fundamentally on power-driven machinery which transcends the physical limits of its human directors, multiplying indefinitely the capacity for the production of goods. Science in all its branches - physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology - is the servant and upholder of this system

Eliezer Yudkowsky

By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization simply fail to exist in the first place.

Civilization is the world with its leg asleep.

Bruce Sterling

Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization.

Boyd Rice

What I question is the extent to which any of us truly knows what the facts really are. I mistrust every ideal cherished in western democratic civilization. The words that make others smile and nod in agreement cause me to recoil.

Jane Goodall

I don't care two hoots about civilization. I want to wander in the wild.

James Weldon Johnson

...evil is a force and, like the physical and chemical forces, we cannot annihilate it; we may only change its form. We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen of other forms

Will Durant

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

Jose Rizal

The Filipino embraces civilization and lives and thrives in every clime, in contact with every people.

George William Curtis

The test of civilization is its estimate of women.

Derrick Jensen

Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.

Derrick Jensen

From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.

Derrick Jensen

Civilization can never be sustainable.

Derrick Jensen

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

Derrick Jensen

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Edmund Hillary

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a yeti.

Dian Fossey

Gorillas are almost altruistic in nature. There's very little if any 'me-itis.' When I get back to civilization I'm always appalled by 'me, me, me.'

Dennis Miller

They have an amazing proliferation of TV channels now: The all-cartoon channel, the 24-hour-science fiction channel. Of course, to make room for these they got rid of the Literacy Channel and the What's Left of Civilization Channel.

Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

I remind everybody that the Sabbath was the Jewish gift to civilization.

Edgar Cayce

Arcturus is the highest civilization in our galaxy,

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been.

Edgar Mitchell

We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.

Edgar Mitchell

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.

Arthur Koestler

I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.

Ayn Rand

Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.

Bertrand Russell

From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary...

Bertrand Russell

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Benito Mussolini

A nation of spaghetti eaters cannot restore Roman civilization!

Benjamin Disraeli

Religion is civilization, the highest.