453 quotes found
“What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shant embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something ...”
“Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.”
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
“I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being ...”
“We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time.”
“One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.”
“Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpet...”
“Politics bores you?" Bronsen said.Julien smiled. "It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven't tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that...”
“In civilized societies, if you are offended by a cartoon, you do not burn flags, take up guns and raid buildings, chant death to your opponents, or threaten suicide bombings. You write a letter to ...”
“I thought society would do the right thing. Now I look around and I think -- society never does the right thing. Sometimes people do the right thing. Sometimes one person makes a difference. But ci...”
“The true mark of English conversation is not being able to tell when you've been insulted. I think the more sophisticated society becomes, the more it hides behind the masks it manufactures.”
“Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?”
“Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see ...”
“...a woman smart and persistent enough that even a PhD in psychology hasn't clouded her insight into how people think and act.”
“If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives ...”
“There is no way I can avoid thinking about the kind of world I belong to. The abuse of utopias disfigures everything.”
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.", September 14, 1958)”
“I don't know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it's not so important. Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly ma...”
“Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”
“The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women.”
