453 quotes found
“Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience ...”
“Somewhere on the Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save The World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle.”
“If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,(...) I am tame. I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same ti...”
“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yo...”
“You've made a beast of yourself,- to the beasts you may go.”
“Encouragement of sedentarism is perhaps the oldest "state project," a project related to the second-oldest state project of taxation.”
“That frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device; the more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier underwrote popular freedom.”
“Civilization has made life a humanized jungle, a sugar coated jungle, but still a jungle”
“No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library ... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.”
“Bell defined civilization in the language of a Bloomsbury connoisseur: A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a d...”
“Of course I realized that the Protestants denominations of the world have grown and matured over the years, but maybe we should not throw away the gains of the old Protestants that brought us to ou...”
“Those who haven't been exposed to the hypocrisies of a civilized education react to things 'naturally', as they happen. It is in the here and now that they are either happy or unhappy, joyful or sa...”
“Why wasn't I already kissing this woman? Why wasn't I naked, eating violets, and playing music underneath the open sky?Looking around the room again, everything seemed terribly ridiculous. These pe...”
“Civilization is a scheme to hide nakedness.”
“What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this w...”
“The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's itfoam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceabl...”
“And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace--and with what confidence?”
“They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.”
“There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.”
“There has never been but one question in all civilization-how to keep a few men from saying to many men: You work and earn bread and we will eat it.”
