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"After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization."
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"From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization."

"The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps."

"In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions."

"If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts."

"From first to last the civilization of America has been bound up with its physical environment."

"The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization."

"The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization."

"Civilization could not exist without tremors of desire and without the counteracting, negation force of disciplined denial. Nor would the gyratory pulsations of a lively civilization exist devoid of the convulsive chemistry of union and repellency. We are born with a desire to be immortal. Cursed with the knowledge that we must die, people live their orthodox lives out by displaying reckless abandon as to the outcome of human life or nervously hounded by utter despondency nipping their heels. How we resolve this decidedly human complex of carrying out our daily lives while burden by our inescapable mortality determines our essential character. The collation of similar values adopted by our community determines who we are as a people."
Explore more quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

"I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power."

"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."

"We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?"

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."

"Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon."

"As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful."
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