#desert

it wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it .... what man calls civilization always results in deserts .... men talk of money and industry of hard times and recoveries of finance and economics but the ants wait and the scorpions wait for while men talk they are making deserts all the time getting the world ready for the conquering ant drought and erosion and desert because men cannot learn .... it wont be long now it wont be long till earth is barren as the moon and sapless as a mumbled bone ↗

— Don Marquis

#civilization #deserts #don-marquis #earth #man

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#away #beauty #desert #feel #gas

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead. ↗

— Van Wyck Brooks

#book #bumped #cape #dead #desert

A nice pop star would do you nice on one of those deserted islands. ↗

— Tom Felton

#islands #nice #pop #pop star #star

I started to draw desert islands. They were just rough, shapes in the middle of the page. Then I began drawing shapes within those shapes and I was amazed how quickly the islands got better. It took off from there. ↗

— Billy Connolly

#began #better #desert #draw #drawing

I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt. ↗

— Roald Dahl

#egypt #fighter #fighter pilot #flew #flying

You can see when an actor gets bored: Their eyes go dead. I promised myself I'd never let that happen. If it does, I'll go and live on a desert island for a year. ↗

— Anna Friel

#bored #dead #desert #desert island #does

It was so quiet that morning in Paris that the heels of my two companions and myself were loud on the deserted pavements. It was a city of shuttered shops, and barred windows, and deserted avenues. ↗

— Philip Gibbs

#barred #city #companions #deserted #heels

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification. ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#adventure #america #civilization #desertion #emigration

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. ↗

— Samuel Ullman

#deserting #enthusiasm #give #grow #grows