Vivek Wadhwa Quotes

I've thought a lot about how if something horrible happened, and if it were like 'The Road' situation, I've decided I don't want to survive past the death of society as we know it.

I loved Zack Snyder's 'Dawn of the Dead' and '28 Days Later' and '28 Weeks Later.' I would love to be involved with a film that shows the breakdown of society and a small group of survivors in a world that has crumbled. That's something I would like to explore.

In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse.

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

The future is always a dystopia in movies.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

We've gone from, in the '50s and '60s, being very optimistic about the future, where the future is all spaceships and The Jetsons and flying cars, to where we were just sure the future was going to be a massive pile of rubble.

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.

I think because the show ["Grant MacLaren"] is essentially a hopeful show. The show says that as bleak as the future is, the one thing that mankind developed was the ability to send their consciousness back and where a lot of the institutions of modern life have fallen apart.

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say - touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.

There are those who say that when civilization progresses a bit further transportation facilities will move into the skies and under the ground, and that our streets will again be quiet, but I know perfectly well that when that day comes some new device for torturing the old will be invented.

It's an absurdity to just wish for a world of chaos without anything viable in its place. I'm loyal to my culture, my creed, the human race and my people and I don't want to see them all end up in a Mad Max movie.

If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.

Technological civilizations don't last long. You're all right until you get a printing press. Then a race starts between technology and common sense. And maybe technology always wins.

The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery.

If you make a movie of the present day culture, in the future it'll be a horror film.

I'm convinced that the catastrophes of the next two decades will be so vast as to bring about a world where life, if it survives, will be far simpler - and the technologies, too. Then we will have come full circle to something like life on the savanna.

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of the health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

I've always enjoyed stories that take place in the future but my one disappointment was that the future books described never came. We're not on other planets, there are no flying cars, and the only robots we have in our homes just sweep the floor. So I wanted to write about a future that I thought could really happen. People ask me when I tell them the title of the book, 'Are we all dead?' The good news is, no. We're still here. And I even think the future in my book is strangely hopeful, although I'm sure there will be people who strongly disagree.

Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.