Tower Of Babel Quotes

• If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

  Franz Kafka

  Climbing, Hiking, Towers

  Franz Kafka (2016). “Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka”, p.354, Archipelago

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• As a system of philosophy it is not like the Tower of Babel, so daring its high aim as to seek a shelter against God's anger; but it is like a pyramid poised on its apex.

  Adam Sedgwick

  Philosophy, Pyramids, Towers

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• But all this language gotten, and augmented by Adam and his posterity, was again lost at the tower of Babel , when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an oblivion of his former language.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Men, Hands, Towers

  Thomas Hobbes (1750). “The Moral and Political Works To which is Prefixed the Autors Life, Extracted from that Said to be Written by Himself ... Illustr. by the Ed. - London 1750”, p.107

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• Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr

  Marshall McLuhan

  Mean, Technology, Men

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• If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

  Frank Moore Cross

  Taken, Towers, Deities

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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• A bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and no hearers.

  Alexander Smith

  History, Towers, Pits

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• How will the Tower of Babel be undone? How will we understand each other in Heaven? Will we all speak English or Dutch or Latin? No, we will speak music.

  Peter Kreeft

  Faith, Latin, Inspiration

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• There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.

  Tullian Tchividjian

  Differences, Towers, Stories

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• What [Franz] Kafka says about the Tower of Babel: In the beginning there were actually many languages, and then as a punishment God gave the world a single language. And then they stopped understanding each other.

  Elie Wiesel

  Punishment, Understanding, Towers

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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• ... I see the green earth covered with the works of man or with the ruins of men’s work. The pyramids weigh down the earth, the tower of Babel has pierced the sky, the lovely temples and the gray castles have fallen into ruins. But of all those things which hands have built, what hasn’t fallen nor ever will fall? Dear friends, throw away the trowel and mortarboard! Throw your masons’ aprons over your heads and lie down to build dreams! What are temples of stone and clay to the soul? Learn to build eternal mansions of dreams and visions!

  Selma Lagerlöf

  Dream, Lying, Fall

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• Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Sleep, Idols, Towers

  Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, Dominique Scheffel-Dunand (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p.208, University of Toronto Press

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• I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

  Charles Darwin

  Book, Tyrants, Rainbow

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• Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild motley throng, men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes, featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav. Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn, these bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Ttose, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws in street and alley. What strange tongues are loud accents of menace alien to our air, voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded?

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Passion, Men, Voice

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Unguarded Gates”

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• Our Lord never called His people to help build the tower of Babel in the hope of getting a Bible study in the basement. He commanded us to build our own city on a hill.

  David Chilton

  Cities, People, Towers

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• Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate.

  Norman Mailer

  Country, America, People

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