John Ciardi Quote

The missing link between humans and apes? It's certainly those brutes who haven't yet learned to respect privacy.

We human beings regard ourselves as (or compare ourselves to) animals only when it suits us.

The modern man is usually in a hurry to get to a destination from which he will sooner or later suffer from and at times complain about boredom.

Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses...

Civilization could not exist without tremors of desire and without the counteracting, negation force of disciplined denial. Nor would the gyratory pulsations of a lively civilization exist devoid of t...

Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.

Just like you silly bums, I have a personal sky god. I bow to him, as you do to your airy-fairy sod. He prefers I call him Mr. NOT.

Death is number one on the list of things that we wish were possible to leave behind when we escaped barbarism.

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy...

With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recomm...