#civilization

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."

"Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually."

"The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization."

"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."

"I am beginning to understand,"said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me..."

"[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 the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it."

"I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind."

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."

"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 the milder form of rivalry which is the motive force of the great portion of the serious labors of mankind."

"Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed."

"No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much."

"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."

"Music and symbols, they're older than human race.Prehuman beings used them to teach early mankind."

"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world."

"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."

"Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost."

"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."

"Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails."

"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 and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do."