Culture Quote by Victor Hugo

“They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they…

— Henry James

“Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough-but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City,…

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“I stamp out vast empires. I crush palaces in my rigid hands. I harden my heart against churches. I blot out cemetaries. I feed…

— Harry Crosby

“Civilization is diaphanous: a dazzling display, beautiful, a brilliant golden orb of order and geometric precision. But just touch it lightly and see toward…

— David Grant Urban

“Perhaps that is the greatest crime of conquest--that a civilization is denied the right to evolve beyond its own embarrassment.”

— Neal Shusterman

“Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal…

— Henry David Thoreau

“Maybe it’s time to realize that our greatest contributions are not the monuments that we construct, but the lives that we change because we…

— Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater. It is this great…

— Henry Miller

“...given the behaviour of human beings throughout the ages, they do not deserve life, with its many dark sides, in all its beauty, grandeur…

— José Saramago

“People who have outrageous skills and abilities are the gold nuggets in the river bed of human history.”

— Michael Pryor

“For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we…

— Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

“It is difficult to associate these horrors with the proud civilizations that created them: Sparta, Rome, The Knights of Europe, the Samurai... They worshipped…

— Han from Enter the Dragon