"A world government with powers adequate to guarantee security is not a remote ideal for the distant future. It is an urgent necessity if our civilization is to survive."
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Civilization quotes
Civilization
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Civilization quotes (page 21 of 119)
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"Nor do I take into account a danger of starting a chain reaction of a scope great enough to destroy part or all of the planet...But it is not necessary to imagine the earth being destroyed like a nova by a stellar explosion to understand vividly the grow ing scope of atomic war and to recognize that unless another war is prevented it is likely to bring destruction on a scale never before held possible, and even now hardly conceived, and that little civilization would survive it."
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"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
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"Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents"
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"Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals."
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"Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few."
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"Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends-the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions."
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"Civil confusions often spring from trifles but decide great issues."
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"Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below."
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"Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints."
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"The enemies of American civilization-- for such are the enemies of slavery-- seem to be more on the alert than its friends."
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"Champagne is the wine of civilization and the oil of government."
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"Unless we redesign our civilization in numerous ways, all of the science in the world won't save us."
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"A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it."
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"Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war."
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"If civilization has an opposite, it is war."
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"Civilization depends on morality."
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"The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman."
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"The sign, which says: "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door!" - Of course, I've read it. Why do you think I want it opened?.. To see why they wanted it shut, of course. This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking."
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"Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge."
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