A Quote by Ezra Pound

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

Ezra Pound

Quote Topics

Civilization His Hope Man May Measure Measures Nation Time

Quote Author

Ezra Pound
American - Poet
October 30, 1885 - November 1, 1972

To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.

Herbert

It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilization...we think it is an affair of epochs, and nations. It's really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilized and the other a barbarian...All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

William Dean Howells

the giver measures his gift with one yardstick, and the receiver measures it with another.

Laura Huxley

I believe Ofsted measures poverty. It measures deprivation. It doesn't measure excellence.

Angela Rayner

God never measures the mind... He always put His tape measure in the HEART

Corrie Ten Boom

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life that a man measures himself.

Elie Wiesel

Many people correctly make the point that our only hope is to turn to God. For example, Charles Lindbergh, who said that in his young manhood he thought "science was more important than either man or God," and that "without a highly developed science modern man lacks the power to survive," . . . went to Germany after the war to see what Allied bombing had done to the Germans, who had been leaders in science. There, he says, "I learned that if his civilization is to continue, modern man must direct the material power of his science by the spiritual truths of his God."

Marion G. Romney

Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge.

Felix Frankfurter

Man ever talks, and Man ever dreams Of better days that are yet to be, After glittering goal, that distant gleams, Running and racing untiringly. The worldly may grow old and young as it will, But the Hope of man is Improvement still. Hope bears him into life in her arms, She flutters around the boy's young bloom, The soul of youth with her magic warms, Nor rests with age in the silent tomb; For ends man his weary course at the grave, There plants he Hope o'er his ashes to wave.

Friedrich Schiller

The only true hope for civilization-the conviction of the individual that his inner life can affect outward events and that, whether or not he does so he is responsible for them.

Stephen Spender

Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures. ... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies. ... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable.

Isabelle Eberhardt

When life is so harsh that a man loses all hope in himself, then he raises his eyes to a shining rock, worshipping it, just to find hope again, rather than looking to his own acts for hope and salvation. Yes, atheism IS a redemptive belief. It is theism that denies man's own redemptive nature.

Isaac Asimov

If a man has no worries about himself at all for the sake of love toward God and the working of good deeds, knowing that God is taking care of him, this is a true and wise hope. But if a man takes care of his own business and turns to God in prayer only when misfortunes come upon him which are beyond his power, and then he begins to hope in God, such a hope is vain and false. A true hope seeks only the Kingdom of God... the heart can have no peace until it obtains such a hope. This hope pacifies the heart and produces joy within it.