Clive Barker Quotes

Nothing will see us through the age we're entering but high consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

You don’t get to have Thomas Jefferson unless you first have Martin Luther and that brought great turmoil.

What art was to the ancient world, science is to the modern.

We can surely boast of having set the world a beautiful example of a government reformed by reason alone, without bloodshed.

Learning has freed more men than all the armies in human history.

I have found here in America a philosophic revolution, philosophically effected.

We have really made an advance in civilization, that the principles on which our political and social order rest are in harmony with the laws of the universe, that we have set up an ideal which may never in genuine happiness certain...We are getting rid of old world things and becoming accustomed to the new. We are forming new creeds, new judgments, new manners; we are becoming a new race of men.

Western civilization is the most successful civilization the world has ever seen. And some of the reasons for that is it's borrowed from other cultures along the way, back to Mosaic law, the Greek age of reason, Roman law and the Roman order of government, and the Republican form of government, by the way that we're guaranteed in our constitution.

Why since I am myself subject to birth, ageing, disease, death, sorrows and defilement, do I seek after what is also subject to these things? Suppose, being myself subject these things, seeking danger in them, I were to seek the unborn, unageing, und.

Youth is something very new: twenty years ago no one mentioned it.

One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young's theory that "as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death." Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one!

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale-involving hundreds of millions of people-and may eventually be recognized as the principal cultural development of our age.

I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age

We often hear that the digital age has resulted in a devaluing of time, space, and place. But I wonder if theseclaims are exaggerated.

Each age has its choice of the death it will die.

This then is the age of reason.

Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.