Society and Culture
The kinds of greatness which our society produces over the years ahead will be the kinds ot greatness we inspire, and will have to be securely rooted in our values.
—Rockefeller Report on Education
Civilization is the making of civil persons.
—John Ruskin (1819-1900 British writer and art critic)
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
—Ezra Pound (American poet)
The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness.
—William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965 British novelist and playwright)
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
—Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne clemens 1835-1910 American humorist)
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
—Cyril Connolly (1903-1974 British literary critic and writer)
History is past politics, and politics is present history.
—Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892 British historian)
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.
—Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965 British poet and critic)
History is the ship carrying living memories into the future.
—Stephen Harold Spender (1909- British poet and critic)
How many things, both just and unjust, are sanctioned by custom!
—Terence (Publius Terentius Afer 195/185-159 B.C. Roman playwright)
The dead govern the living.
—Auguste Comte (1798-1857 French mathematician and philosopher)
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
—William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965 British novelist and playwright)
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd.
—Sir Wiston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965 British Prime Minister)
A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.
—Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965 British poet and critic)
Peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
—George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831 German philosopher)