Alive Quote by Robert Graves

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

— Pierre Schaeffer

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

— Jonas Mekas

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

— Samuel Beckett

“All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a…

— William Dean Howells

“how a people who had raised such mighty works, could have allowed themselves to be conquered by illiterate barbarians.”

— Ross Laidlaw

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be…

— Alasdair MacIntyre

I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I…

— Kevin Young

Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilization...we think it is an affair of epochs, and nations. It's really an affair of individuals.…

— William Dean Howells

“It is always necessary to remain barbarians, because it is the barbarians who always win.”

— Irwin Shaw

The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the…

— Lord Acton