Civilization Quotes - page 67
The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fiber of our national life. If sometimes our great artist have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.
John F. Kennedy
The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.
Ronald Reagan
Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come-whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending. More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-circuits the metaphysics of desire on which Christianity and capitalism (and so much else in our civilization) depend.
Michael Pollan
I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.
John Adams
They have tried to hang me on an isolated word, taken out of context from my whole speech ... I did not say anything against the Islamic civilization... It's the work of some people in the Italian leftist press who wanted to tarnish my image and destroy my long-standing relations with Arabs and Muslims.
Silvio Berlusconi
My friends, our challenge today is not to save Western civilization - or Eastern, for that matter. All civilization is at stake, and we can save it only if all peoples join together in the task.
You Americans did so much, in the last century, to build an effective multilateral system, with the United Nations at its heart. Do you need it less today, and does it need you less, than 60 years ago?
Surely not. More than ever today, Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system through which the world's peoples can face global challenges together. And in order to function more effectively, the system still cries out for far-sighted American leadership, in the Truman tradition.
I hope and pray that the American leaders of today, and tomorrow, will provide it.
Kofi Annan
You know why I go to museums on my day off? It restores my sense of Western Civilization, of History-it gives me a reason to go on... But at the same time I think, "Is this gonna be here 50 years from now, with the Muslims taking over the world? What will they do if they become a majority in America? What, burn the museums, throw the paintings into a bonfire?" I mean, I really ask myself how this can go on.
Michael Savage
We hope that war will not take place, but if war is forced upon us then Iraq will continue to be here and this country with history of over 8000 years, this country, the cradle of the first civilization of humanity will not finish just like that even though a huge power may want to be like that. Nobody! Nobody should accept that Iraq should finish in such a way!
Saddam Hussein
Hayek should be taken seriously because he has correctly identified as the most serious problems confronting civilization in the twentieth century the problems of nationalism and totalitarianism. Even with the dereliction of European communism at the end of the twentieth century, the problems which remain or are reemerging in the shape of ethnic conflict, separatist national movements, and regional trading blocs stem from practices and ideas which the liberal tradition has consistently criticized: ideas hostile to individualist, universalist, and egalitarian moral principles. While thinkers like Hannah Arendt have also recognized the threat and moral danger posed by totalitarianism, it is in Hayek's work that we have the most thorough attempt to understand the logic of its institutional alternative.
Friedrich Hayek
We Filipinos are the most promising people in the world. We have unheard-of-possibilities. There have never been a people similarly situated. Here we are in the Orient with our Oriental thoughts and sentiments, but living amid a civilization more Western than was ever known in The East. The Philippines is the only country where East meets West. The Filipino is a true cosmopolitan. From him the world may expect something new and distinctive.
Epifanio de los Santos
In science, technology, economics, industry, agriculture, armaments, and democratic rule, America, Europe, and Japan are generations ahead. But the Islamic world retains something the West has lost: a desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, cultures, families, and faith.
Pat Buchanan
Historically, as the faith dies, the culture and civilization to which it gave birth die, and then the people die. And a new tribe with its own gods comes to occupy the emptying land. On the old and new continents, it is the native-born of European ancestry who are de-Christianizing, aging and dying.
Pat Buchanan
There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade. It has set civilization back a hundred years, and in particular has it made the settlement and understanding of race problems more difficult and more doubtful. It is widely believed by many that the Jewish problem in Germany was episodic, and is already passing. Visitor to the Olympic Games are apt to have gotten that impression. They saw no Jewish oppression. Just as Northern visitors to Mississippi see no Negro oppression.
W. E. B. Du Bois
I don't think the issue's about being against gay marriage. It's about being for traditional marriage and articulating the reason that's important. You have to have a basic family structure. There's never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived. So there is a sense in which, you know, it's one thing to say if people want to live a different way, that's their business. But when you want to redefine what family means or what marriage means, then that's an issue that should require some serious and significant debate in the public square.
Mike Huckabee
