“The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.”

In the memory of the dead all chronological differences are effaced.

What I’d like to be above all is a writer.

The Nautilus was piercing the water with its sharp spur, after having accomplished nearly ten thousand leagues in three months and a half, a distance greater than the great circle of the earth. Where were we going now, and what was reserved for the future?

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

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.

I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.

All great actions return to God, from whom they are derived.

Powder is but a thing of yesterday, and war is as old as the human race-unhappily.

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.

On the surface of the ocean, men wage war and destroy each other; but down here, just a few feet beneath the surface, there is a calm and peace, unmolested by man

The sea is the vast reservoir of Nature. The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it?

Well, I feel that we should always put a little art into what we do. It’s better that way.

While there is life there is hope. I beg to assert…that as long as a man’s heart beats, as long as a man’s flesh quivers, I do not allow that a being gifted with thought and will can allow himself to despair.

I say, you do have a heart!” “Sometimes,” he replied, “when I have the time.

I wanted to see what no one had yet observed, even if I had to pay for this curiosity with my life.

And when the time is right, I hope that African Americans will again look to the party of emancipation, civil liberty, and individual freedom.

In a free society we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior, but if we’re civilized people we publicly criticize that and don’t belong to those groups or associate with those people.

Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never wavered in my support for civil rights or the civil rights act.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.

We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.