Civilization Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

“In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?”

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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More by Gilbert K. Chesterton

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place...The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which made him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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More Civilization quotes

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of…

Octavio Paz

Sentiment is the mightiest force in civilization; not sentimentality, but sentiment. Women will bring this into politics. Home, sweet home, is as powerful on…

Judith Ellen Foster

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Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.

Nicolas Gomez Davila

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We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000…

Julian Assange

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Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been…

Ernest Hemingway

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Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a…

Carl Jung

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The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing…

Carl von Clausewitz

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Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The mission is, not to replace old world mindlessness with new world mindlessness, but to put an end to all forms of brainless authoritarianism.”

Abhijit Naskar

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We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as…

Terence McKenna