Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

The culture of Saudi Arabia belongs to a past age. It is not appropriate for the age of globalization.

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

Everything new appears from the elements of the Past, because “ex nihilo nihil fit.” The prolific development of culture requires that the inventory of values be kept in the memory of tradition and passed to future generations

As both an essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist, I write about and for the future. I talk about the past to remind us that what we believe has always been true - that men and women are somehow static categories, or that men in power has always been the default, or that same-sex love affairs were always taboo - has not always been thus.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

The Chinese people, too, went through all kinds of vicissitudes in their religious development.

I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

It's easy to laugh at etiquette, but in a hundred years, our children's grandchildren will almost certainly be laughing at us.

As a proud Catholic, I know the impact that faith-based education can have in our society and have witnessed it first hand in my district.

Listen, you know this: If there's not a rebellious youth culture, there's no culture at all. It's absolutely essential. It is the future. This is what we're supposed to do as a species, is advance ideas.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

You know the puritan ethic that started out four centuries ago in this country, needless to say - at least for the moment - a thing of the past - from what I can tell.

Even with, or perhaps, because of, this background, I have over the past few years sensed a very dramatic change in attitude on the part of Prince Edward Islanders towards the on-going rush for so-called modernization.

I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.

As a society, I think we express our cultural mores through our politics. We're trying constantly to figure out what's OK and what's not OK. And it's hard, because our society is constantly buffeted by gale force winds of technology. Things are always changing.

While the association and its founders and its founders most sincerely appreciate the splendid elements and achievements of the old-time Indian culture and the methods by which early conditions were met, it realizes most keenly the inefficacy of these methods in meeting the conditions of modern times.

The battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith which will replace the rotting corpse of Christianity

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

Neo-conservatives are unlike old conservatives because they are utilitarians, not moralists, and because their aim is the prosperity of post-industrial society, not the recovery of a golden age.