Kelly Miller Quotes

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

Civilizations are a matter of the mind.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

The Past, The Present, For the Future

Cultural goods … are the source of the Nation's identity, continuity and development.

One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigor of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards

I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.

The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

I know that my grandfather is 92 years old. And he has seen this country evolve in amazing ways. He looks at South Carolina and he says, wow, what an amazing state that we have the blessing to live within because of the evolution.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

Culture is evolving, and I'm along for the ride.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child.

Japan has opened a new chapter in its history.

The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right.