David Goodstein Quotes
Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.
Quotes to Explore
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The truth doesn't hurt unless it ought to.
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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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I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.
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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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We Jews have been too adaptable. We have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies for the sake of social conformity. … Even in modern civilization, the Jew is most happy if he remains a Jew.
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Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.
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The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.
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A man is not necessarily a master because he happened to compose two or three centuries ago. Let us beware of the worship of mere antiquity.
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I'm afraid I am a bit of a technophobe - a nineteenth-century man caught in the twenty-first century. But there is one piece of technology that I would especially welcome: a device to automatically balance restaurant tables on all four legs so that they don't rock back and forth.
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Further strengthenings of the self-centered instinct for survival recruit even greater numbers of people into some sort of ring of fellowship (church or gender, red state or blue) by populating the terra incognita outside the ring with enough barbarians to verify the existence of a civilization within--to define the preferred stock by what, as all good people agree, it decidedly is not.
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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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In the next century it will be the early mechanical bird which get the first plastic worm out of the artificial grass.
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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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The decline and fall of a civilization is barely noticed by most of its citizens.
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The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.
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But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.
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Being Southern and being the guy I've been all my life, I've lived more on the lighter side of life. I have a dark side, but that's not where I come from. A lot of artists like to come from that.
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In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins, not through strength but by perseverance.
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Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.
