Quotes to inspire and reflect

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else.

What will remain of a civilization that reverences a man above all the poets because he can make a cheap automobile at$500 each?

The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct.

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

The social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to real star patterns.

The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.

All the citizens of a state cannot be equally powerful, but they may be equally free.

A good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella—artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.

Our whole system of government is based on “We the people,” but if we the people don’t pay attention to what's going on, we have no right to bellyache or squawk when things go wrong.

The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight.

In America there must be only citizens, not divided by grade, first and second, but citizens, east, west, north, and south.

To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens.

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.

Those self-important fathers of their country / Think they’re above the people. Why they’re nothing! / The citizen is infinitely wiser.

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome / Of what the mighty City is herself, / To thousands upon thousands of her sons, / Living amid the same perpetual whirl / Of trivial objects, melted and reduced / To one identity.

There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

Las Vegas takes what in other American towns is but a quixotic inflammation of the senses for some poor salary mule in the brief interval between the flagstone rambler and the automatic elevator downtown and magnifies it, foliates it, embellishes it into an institution.

I swore I'd be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.

I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of streets.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete.

The urban man is an uprooted tree, he can put out leaves, flowers and grow fruit but what a nostalgia his leaf, flower, and fruit will always have for mother earth!

Cities produce ferocious men, because they produce corrupt men; the mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?

’Tis the men, not the houses, that make the city.

A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

A very populous city can rarely, if ever, be well governed.

Circus, n. A place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves.

Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.

The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house.

How beautiful to have the church always open, so that every tired wayfaring man may come in and be soothed by all that art can suggest of a better world when he is weary with this.

The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.

While God waits for His temple to be built of love, / men bring stones.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.

God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.

Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?