Books Quote by William Dean Howells

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

“Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.”

— Vernor Vinge

“The nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people’s minds away from the reality of death.”

— Antal Szerb

“All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.”

— Voltaire

“Books, in all their variety, offer the human intellect the means whereby civilization may be carried triumphantly forward.”

— Anonymous

“And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its…

— Richard Mitchell

“All definitions of civilization along to a conjugation which goes: "I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian.”

— Felipe Fernández-Armesto

“The ancient Greeks who created the magnificent sculptures and structures were the same people who could be utterly cruel and barbaric.”

— Julia Vickers

Literature transcends national boundaries, racial boundaries. It goes deep into the issues that concern all human beings. That is why, when people read Greek…

— Gao Xingjian

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as…

— Os Guinness

“The light of reason and civilization was virtually snuffed out by the Barbarian hordes who swarmed across Europe, annihilating everything the Romans had put…

— Terry Jones