Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf Quotes

We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.

A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it.

One of the most important features of the later stages of capitalist civilization is the vigorous expansion of the educational apparatus and particularly of the facilities for higher education.

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

We are destined to be a barrier against the return of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a colossus shall we be when the southern continent comes up to our mark! What a stand will it seem as a ralliance for the reason and freedom of the globe!

It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

History is not just the evolution of technology; it is the evolution of thought.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.

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.

Basically [Louise] Brandeis was a Jeffersonian. And you say the timing is great, and it is in a lot of senses, except not for [Tomas] Jefferson, because this is a Hamiltonian moment, and he's the rock star of the minute with a great musical.

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.

We're a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.

The people of Iran have been battling against consecutive conflicts between tradition and modernity for over 100 years... some have tried and are trying to see the world through the eyes of their predecessors and to deal with the problems and difficulties of the existing world by virtue of the values of the ancients... many others...seek to go forth in step with world developments and not lag behind the caravan of civilization, development and progress.

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.

I thought, giving Jeb Bush the benefit of the doubt all these years, that he was sitting, saying, what a numbnut, what an idiot. My brother's a fool. He's listening to these neocons that talked him into this war. Dad would have never done this.

I'm convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

We are all descended from cavemen who broke the skulls of their enemies with rocks for fun or profit. But that hardly mitigates the crimes of a man who does the same thing today. I see no problem judging the behavior of the Islamic State and its apologists from the vantage point of the West's high horse, because we've earned the right to sit in that saddle.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.