A Quote by Wendell Berry

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Wendell Berry

Quote Topics

Against Being Best Civilization Passes Serve

Quote Author

Wendell Berry
American - Novelist
Born: August 5, 1934

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

Octavia Butler

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Victor Hugo

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Irving Howe

Being able to compete against the best, having success against the best, and to be included with the best - that's something I really relished whenever I got on the court.

Muggsy Bogues

It is clear that every civilization undergoes a process of historical change. We can see that a civilization comes into existence, passes through a long experience, and eventually goes out of existence.

Carroll Quigley

Rebellion against technology and civilization is real rebellion, a real attack on the values of the existing system. But the green anarchists, anarcho-primitivists, and so forth (The "GA Movement") have fallen under such heavy influence from the left that their rebellion against civilization has to great extent been neutralized. Instead of rebelling against the values of civilization, they have adopted many civilized values themselves and have constructed an imaginary picture of primitive societies that embodies these civilized values.

Theodore Kaczynski

I have always been in favor of a healthy Americanization, but that does not mean a complete disavowal of our German heritage. It means that our character should take on the best of that which is American, and combine it with the best of that which is German. By doing this, we can best serve the American people and their civilization.

Carl Schurz

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.

Storm Jameson

At a certain point you have to make a decision in your life about where will you best serve, and I decided that I would best serve as a producer as opposed to a studio executive. There are many upsides to being the studio executive, but one of the downsides is that you get removed from the actual process of making the movie.

Adam Leipzig

My biggest obligation is to serve the people of this organization, and to serve them well. I serve them with the best benefit packages, whether it's health care, dental or a 401(k) plan. I support them with the tools they need to be the very best they can possibly be.

David Steward

What really excited me at the end was the challenge of being the best I can be and prolonging my best level and playing against the best players in the world. But now that I don't have the opportunity to play against the best players in the world when it counts, in front of fans, it doesn't excite me as much.

Steve Nash

To serve Armenia is to serve civilization.

William E. Gladstone

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

Eugenio Montale

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.

Yoko Ono

It is against their own insoluble problem of being human that the dull and base in humanity are in revolt in anti-Semitism. Judaism, nevertheless, together with Hellenism and Christianity is an inalienable component of our Christian Western civilization, the eternal "call to Sinai" against which humanity again and again rebels.