Ethel Smyth Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.
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A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
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A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.
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It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies.
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The mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization.
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The best test of the quality of a civilization is the quality of its leisure.
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Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.
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The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place.
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You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, and wipe it clean of life - but if you desire to defend it, protect it,and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman Legions did - by putting your soldiers in the mud.
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... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
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Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.
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I believe in courtesy. It is the way we avoid hurting people's feelings. She thought that maybe, just maybe, western civilization was in decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock.
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War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.
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I think women can save civilization.
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More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else...All our lauded technological progress-our very civilization-is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
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I believe that the civilization India evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors, Rome went, Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken; Japan has become Westernized; of China nothing can be said; but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation.
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The last great struggle for our rights; the battle for our own civilization, is entirely with ourselves, and the problem is to be solved by us.
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Muse of the many twinkling feet, whose charms are now extending up from legs to arms.
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With thee all tales are sweet; each clime has charms; earth - sea alike - our world within our arms.
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Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
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Being of service is not an option, it is a biological necessity. Every kind of action we do for someone is a reanimation of our own life force - and of the other person's.
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The charms of seclusion are seldom combined with the conveniences of civilization.
