Civilization Quotes - Page 3

Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.

G.K. Chesterton

But, for myself, the Earth’s records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization.

Edgar Allan Poe

But the bars that held you, the bars that kept you in were the luxury and soft living. It is hard to walk out on a thing like that

Clifford D. Simak

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The necessity, then, of those “lesser breeds without the law”—those wogs, barbarians, niggers—is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply “spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again,” leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest.

James Baldwin

civilization is the very root cause of the woes of civilization

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies fromindifference toward the unique values which created it.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Advanced weaponry, victories in battle and space travel do not an advanced species or civilization make.

Christina Engela

It was not exasperation.... It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.

Alfred Bester

Nothing distresses the civilized person like unfettered nature. The Grand Canyon seen from behind the railing is indeed a splendid sight, but as soon as the desert reclaims your golf course that is another matter altogether.

Anthony Marais

We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.

Alistair MacLean

The oldest profession [prostitution] is the most honest, for it exposes the bare bones of what civilization is all about. It's the root of all professions.

Daniel Suelo

A Greek invention, democracy is highly overrated. For starters, it never worked in Greece. The first philosophers were fascists and, even today, 2,500 years later, the "cradle of Western civilization" remains an incompetent state. Roman emperors and a vengeful, authoritarian God are the true European success stories.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power.

Julian Huxley

After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.

Arthur C. Clarke

Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

Joe Haldeman

The university system, a gift of Western civilization to the world, was developed by the Catholic Church.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.

Richard Manning

This civilization is the impact of the world's consumption behavior.

Toba Beta

Barbarians are all alike... sit up half the night to discuss anything a Roman says.

Rudyard Kipling

What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.

Richard Manning

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Aldous Huxley

It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.

Aldous Huxley

On why 300 years separates the first use of glass lenses in spectacles and their use in a telescope: “In many cases there are times when an invention is technologically possible – and in which it may indeed appear necessary, as the telescope may have – but without a market the idea will not sell, and in the absence of the technical and social infrastructure to support it, the invention will not survive.

James Burke

There is no a revolution, without a man!

Hesham Nebr

Thinking the simplest rights of Civilization to The Humanitarian !

Hesham Nebr

Self as such was not normal ..will be like the Justice, which lost its wings !! Both are rivals for the same man ..

Hesham Nebr

The fact that Man is Nature’s perverse instantiation can only lead to the appalling conclusion that Man, too, is some kind of an artificial intelligence

Stephan Attia

You are so civilized. So polite. So brave coming here alone when you know no one here would dare to touch you. So easy to be all those things, when all the power is on your side

Ann Leckie

The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man's revenge upon the strong; it's just what we saw in the past, but in reverse; that everyone should have his turn is only meet. And it shall be turnabout again tomorrow, for nothing in Nature is stable and the governments men direct are bound to prove as changeable and ephemeral as they.

Marquis de Sade

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?

Stanisław Lem

You didn't find any trace of her?" asked d'Arnot. // Tarzan shook his head. "None. In the jungle, I could have found her; but here –-here, in civilization, a man cannot even find himself.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

The more civilization progresses, the hollower it becomes and the easier to destroy it.

Empress Eugenie of France

... man by nature is not a wild or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not, by vicious habit; and that again on the other side, he is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as beasts themselves that are wild by nature, become tame and tractable by housing and gentler usage...

Plutarch

there was no television in the Netherlands during the afternoons!

Robert Ludlum

Since the days of cave civilization to the modern day microprocessor civilization, the relation between man and woman remained the same. Then it was at a carnal level. And, today it is still at carnal level.

Girdhar Joshi

Civilization depends on continually making the effort, of never giving in. It needs to be cared for by men of goodwill, protected from the dark.

Iain Pears

Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.

George Orwell

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

Edward Bellamy

The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations - and absolutely nothing more.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink.But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength.Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance?Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you.

Joseph Conrad

These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.

Lorrie Moore

(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Gullibility is a knife at the throat of civilization.

David Wong

Once, headed uptown on the 9 train, I noticed a sign posted by the Metropolitan Transit Authority advising subway riders who might become ill in the train. The sign asked that the suddenly infirm inform another passenger or get out at the next stop and approach the stationmaster. Do not, repeat, do not pull the emergency brake, the sign said, as this will only delay aid. Which was all very logical, but for the following proclamation at the bottom of the sign, something along the lines of, “If you are sick, you will not be left alone.” This strikes me as not only kind, not only comforting, but the very epitome of civilization, good government, i.e., the the crux of the societal impulse. Banding together, pooling our taxes, not just making trains, not just making trains that move underground, not just making trains that move underground with surprising efficiency at a fair price—but posting on said trains a notification of such surprising compassion and thoughtfulness. I found myself scanning the faces of my fellow passengers, hoping for fainting, obvious fevers, at the very least a sneeze so that I might offer a tissue.

Sarah Vowell

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!

Robert E. Howard

The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

Thomas Lynch

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.

Octave Mirbeau

Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Ray Bradbury

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

Derrick Jensen

The flaw in being civilized is that it permit’s the uncivilized among us to perpetrate horrific crimes against us in the name of freedom and equality.Foreword 'RHG

M.J. Croan

Poets write beautiful words to describe savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.

Toba Beta

A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.

Ralph Caplan

If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Henry David Thoreau

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

Jo Walton

But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

Leo Tolstoy

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

Eric Berne

No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.

Anne Rice

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Civilization Quotes - Page 3

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