The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

Smiles are the language of love.

Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.

Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.

Children always turn to the light.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

No one but a fool is always right.

Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

If the purpose of the stumpy little NFT theatre under Waterloo Bridge is not to acquaint young audiences with Ozu, with Ophuels, with D. W. Griffith and with Agnes Varda, then what exactly does it exist for?

In the '70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

Surely our job while we're here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

The one thing that 'Via Dolorosa' has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.

You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

It has been said that the position of woman is the test of civilization, and that of our women was secure. In them was vested our standard of morals and the purity of our blood.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding.

Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.