453 quotes found
“If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably rightit would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference in...”
“What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.”
“The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans an...”
“[I]n Africa I was a member of a familyof a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you t...”
“[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of th...”
“No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.”
“This law defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or de...”
“If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.”
“[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.”
“If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from h...”
“This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.”
“I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.”
“Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes th...”
“Only by the aid of language does reason bring about its most important achievements, namely the harmonious and consistent action of several individuals, the planned cooperation of many thousands, c...”
“And here was the moment. The end of it all, for civilization was merely another name for friendship, and friendship was coming to an end.”
“If you are trully in a place that is way from the noise of civilization,you can actually experience what real slience is about.It is filled with sounds of nature.There is a musicality,a harmony to ...”
“What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn an...”
“It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it's people who are not willing to hurt other people because the other people are different.”
“Civilization is a myth. That is the truth this world has taught us. We have not risen above our baser instincts... That is what always has and always will drive us.”
“Science is a trigger of changes of civilization. Religion is the failsafe of science performance.”
