Civilization Quotes - Page 25

• We do not see the danger clearly enough that we develop images adequate to our state of civilization. When you watch TV, you know instantly that there's something wrong with the images. When you open a magazine and see the ads, you know there's something wrong with the images. And it's unhealthy and not good and outright dangerous, in my opinion.

  Werner Herzog

  Tvs, Watches, Magazines

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. June 11, 2003.

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• Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it's an endless stalemate.

  Stephen Fry

  World, Destruction, Ends

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. September 22, 2004.

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• I'd like - inviting aliens and have them observe what we do because so much of what we do that we take for granted will just be weird or extraordinary or just plain dumb when observed by an alien from another civilization.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Dumb, Aliens, Granted

  "Neil deGrasse Tyson's 'Cosmos'". "Here And Now" with Jeremy Hobson, kuow.org. March 6, 2014.

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• I am a great believer in what we've been told time and time again by people like Joseph Campbell, "find your bliss." Find out what it is that touches you most deeply. Pursue it, learn about it, explore it, expand on it. Live with it and nurture it. Find your own way and make your own contribution. Find a way to make a contribution to this society because God knows we need contributions from the coming generation. This planet and this civilization is in need. I see it as a time of need.

  Leonard Nimoy

  People, Needs, Generations

  Interview with Karleigh Moore, tech.mit.edu. April 1, 2014.

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• Business, properly understood, is so central to every aspect of our civilization that Republicans should proudly announce that they are indeed the party of business.

  Jacob K. Javits

  Party, Republican, Should

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• A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.

  Charlie Munger

  Crazy, Bankers, Too Much

  "Berkshire's Munger: High-Frequency Trading 'Basically Evil'". Interview with Becky Quick, www.cnbc.com. May 3, 2013.

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• We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination.

  Terence McKenna

  Children, Moving, Past

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• Judeo-Christian revelation is not the negative influence secularists proclaim it to be. Rather, it is the taproot of our civilization.

  Charles Colson

  Christian, Negative, Influence

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• Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

  Thomas Sowell

  Teacher, Children, Teaching

  Thomas Sowell (2002). “Controversial Essays”, Hoover Inst Press

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• If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.

  Cory Booker

  Weakness, Looks, Unions

  "Brick Towers" by Cory Booker, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 11, 2005.

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• If we try to think back to the dim and distant past... what is it that helps us reconstruct those times, and to picture the lives of those who lived in them? It is their art... It is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen.

  Maria Montessori

  Art, Past, Thinking

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• The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization.

  Shulamith Firestone

  Sex, Culture, Foundation

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• I've begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.

  Neil Strauss

  Couple, Eye, Years

  Neil Strauss (2011). “Emergency: One man's story of a dangerous world, and how to stay alive in it”, p.7, Canongate Books

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• To defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilization, you need education...

  Jonathan Sacks

  Country, Army, Needs

  "A Religious Response to Religious Violence". Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks at the Faith Angle Forum in South Beach, Miami, Florida, faithangle.org. May 2015.

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• The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, People, Hazards

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Barbara L. Packer, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson (2003). “The Conduct of Life”, p.51, Harvard University Press

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• 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.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Cute, Trying, Want

  "The Singularity: Humanity's Last Invention?". "All Things Considered" with Martin Kaste, www.npr.org. January 11, 2011.

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• Marriage is the basic building block of civilization. We are redefining it at our own peril.

  Hank Hanegraaff

  Block, Building, Redefining

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• 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.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Ignorant, Overcoming, Acquisition

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• There is increasing social concern about our use of nonhumans for experiments, food, clothing and entertainment. This concern about animals reflects both our own moral development as a civilization and our recognition that the differences between humans and animals are, for the most part, differences of degree and not of kind.

  Gary L. Francione

  Animal, Moral Development, Differences

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• Without fathers you would have no civilization.

  Michael Gurian

  Father

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• ...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

  James Weldon Johnson

  Light, Evil, Succeed

  James Weldon Johnson (2012). “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”, p.84, Courier Corporation

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• Human civilization has been changing the Earths environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.

  Jamais Cascio

  Urbanization, Wind, Creating

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• I think if I were to express my wish, it would be that we are more regionally self-reliant. And I dont mean people being survivalists, I mean regionally self-reliant. So that you have these individual cells. The idea of having different solutions in different areas, so that we have a very robust, durable civilization.

  Daniel Suarez

  Mean, Thinking, Cells

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• Technological civilizations don't last long. You're all right until you get a printing press. Then a race starts between technology and common sense. And maybe technology always wins.

  Jack McDevitt

  Winning, Technology, Race

  Jack McDevitt (2007). “Cauldron”, p.247, Penguin

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• It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime.

  Hayao Miyazaki

  Would Be, Wonderful, Lifetime

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