Civilization By Famous Quotes & Sayings

The practical case for manned spacef light gets ever-weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation - indeed, as a scientist or practical man, I see little purpose in sending people into space at all. But as a human being, I'm an enthusiast for manned missions. — Martin Rees

The reviews on it, and the new novel, Honky Tonk Samurai have been awesome, though I'm of the school if you believe the good ones you got to believe the bad ones, it's been mostly good ones. The previewers seem to be very happy and excited about it. I know I am. There are plans to continue if it does well. — Joe R. Lansdale

The highest test of the civilization of any race is in its willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate. — Booker T. Washington

Ford had another Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the drink which has been described as the alcoholic equivalent of a mugging - expensive and bad for the head. — Douglas Adams

The famous Greek physician Hippocrates administered musical treatments to his patients in 400 B.C. Although this type of treatment did not originate with him, it found in him an exponent of the highest order. With the increasing materialism of Western civilization, the major tenants of ancient musical therapy have been either forgotten or discarded. — Corinne Heline

To use Freud's famous phrase, the civilized are, therefore, the discontent. We do not become losers in civilization but become civilized losers. The collective result of this ineradicable sense of failure is that civilizations take on the spirit of resentment. Acutely sensitive to an imagined audience, they are easily offended by other civilizations. Indeed, even the most powerful societies can be embarrassed by the weakest: the Soviet Union by Afghanistan, Great Britain by Argentina, the United States by Grenada. — James P. Carse

L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, "The Pioneer [sic] has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Interestingly enough, not all feelings result from the body's reaction to external stimuli. Sometimes changes are purely simulated in the brain maps. — Antonio Damasio

Think about that: at a time when it was inconceivable to have a woman rabbi or a woman scholar of Christian theology or canon law, the Islamic civilization boasted hundreds of women who were authorities in Islamic law and Islamic theology and that taught some of the most famous male jurists and left behind a remarkable corpus of writings. — Khaled Abou El Fadl

It amazes me to witness the masochism with which some journalists characterize their industry as a dying species. The future belongs to citizen journalism and blogs. — Mathias Dopfner

If I say your voice is an amber waterfall in which I yearn to burn each day, if you eat my mouth like a mystical rose with powers of healing and damnation, If I confess that your body is the only civilization I long to experience ... would it mean that we are close to knowing something about love? — Aberjhani

Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religion is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think - all these things - twenty-four hours a day. One's religion, then, is ones life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived.
Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, it has little to do with what white people call "religion." It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, and are, is our religion. — Jack D. Forbes

A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature ... — Rebecca Solnit

Nine times out of ten, when a woman says, "I have a boyfriend," what this translates to is, "You just telegraphed too much interest."
It has nothing to do with whether she actually has a boyfriend. In fact, if she is attracted to you, she will often deliberately hide the boyfriend from you until after you have had sex with her.
Whether she mentions him or not in no way proves that he actually exists - only that she had a motive to mention him.
The bottom line is, don't ask about her boyfriend and don't appear fazed if she mentions him. He may not even exist. Just take it as an instance of a lack of interest caused by you telegraphic too much interest far too soon. — Mystery

If you can't help me grow, there's no point with you being in my life. — Jill Scott

I still have faith in people. But that is getting increasingly harder to maintain. I just don't see many people today choosing love. I see people passing it up a lot. Foreclosing on it, deferring it, sabotaging, letting go. — Masha Tupitsyn

My desires are foolish. The things I want are better kept to myself. The hand of silence is steady. The hard blade of silence is clean like night. The code is absolute. Silence is eternal and patient. Silence never makes a fool of itself like I have so many times. — Henry Rollins

Don't let what you never experienced taint your understanding of what could be. — Lisa Anderson

It's not a question of getting more moral soldiers. Instead it's a question of recognizing how the situation of war (and the cultural institutions/practices of the military that we have designed to "prepare" people for that situation) creates monsters out of us all. — Philip G. Zimbardo

Is achieving a meaningful sustainability of all vitally essential life systems for all future generations, wholly dependent upon recognizing our plain obligation as the sole keeper species? — Lee Kierig