Contact
Privacy
Category: civilization
Quotes of Category: civilization
TOP TAGS :my-lovelove-at-first-sightsomewherepowerfulerotic-fantasyjeanette-wintersontearsfart

  1. Iain Pears _ Arcadia

    But what's the point of freedom? Do you think you can change anything?''Of course not. We are waiting.''For what?''Until the world changes on it's own. That is the one truth of history. Everything ends. Civilisations, empires, however powerful and strong. They all end, sooner or later. When it does, we will be there, with all the old ideas and thoughts, preserved and ready to blossom.
    book-quotehistorycivilizationdystopia

  2. Iain Pears _ The Dream of Scipio

    {Pope} Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews?
    book-quotecivilizationpunishmentend-of-the-world

  3. Iain Pears _ The Dream of Scipio

    Manlius ... took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand.
    book-quotecivilizationknowledgeunderstanding

  4. Iain Pears _ The Dream of Scipio

    Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing {a recognizably bad person does} can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the {Nazi} Germans are merely the supreme expression of it.
    book-quotewarcivilizationevil

  5. Iain Pears _ The Dream of Scipio

    Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.
    book-quotecivilizationmaterialismphilosophy

  6. Iain Pears _ The Dream of Scipio

    When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it's not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.
    book-quoteguiltcivilizationknowledge

  7. Jeanette Winterson _ The Powerbook

    There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.
    book-quotehistorycivilizationunderstanding

  8. Jeanette Winterson _ The Powerbook

    There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.
    book-quotehistorycivilization

  9. David Baldacci _ The Christmas Train

    All you have to do {to win a Pulitzer Prize} is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.
    book-quotewarcivilizationdetachment

  10. Thomas Henry Huxley _ The Evolution Of Theology: An

    With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced, and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by , by , by , and especially by , in the seventeenth century; by the English Freethinkers, by , by the , and by the German Rationalists, among whom stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are parting company."
    book-quotesciencecivilizationeurope

  11. Tom Standage _ A History of the World in 6

    During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began.
    book-quotecivilizationculturewine

  12. E.M. Forster _ The Machine Stops

    Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.
    book-quotetravelsoulcivilization
Categories