Quotations about Civilization

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

We pass through this world but once.  Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.  ~Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man

And the wind shall say “Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”
~T.S. Eliot

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.  ~Albert Einstein

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.  ~Lois McMaster Bujold

K is for “Kenghis Khan.”  He was a very nice person.  History has no record of him.  There is a moral in that, somewhere.  ~Harlan Ellison, From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet