A Quote by Honore de Balzac

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible. — © Honore de Balzac
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.
It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
Ignorance is of a peculiar nature; once dispelled, it is impossible to reestablish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.
It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.
If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?
America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.
If the objective of testing were to prove that a program is free of bugs, then not only would testing be practically impossible, but it would also be theoretically impossible.
The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.
My point is, as civilization is progressing, Mosaic law came down from the mountain, was handed to civilization, it emerged through the Greek civilization as the Greeks were developing their Age of Reason. And we're talking about the foundation of Western Civilization, and almost concurrently with that, Roman law was emerging as well.
The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.
In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.
Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
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