Quotes Civilization

Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.  

C.P. Snow

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.  

Albert Einstein

Leash: n, a means by which animals, formerly running wild, are prevented from running tame, also.  

Robert Brault

There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.  

Mark Twain

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.  

John Muir

When tillage begins, other arts follow.  The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.  

Daniel Webster

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.  

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties. 

 Carol Matthau

We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us. 

James Ramsey Ullman

If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.  

Stanley Garn

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.  

Brian Aldiss

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.  

Sigmund Freud

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.  

H.G. Wells

Society is a made-up formula of what we are supposed to be, kept alive by those who believe in it.... I laugh in the ugly face of society, with all its fabricated dimensions.  

Author Unknown

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.  

Henry Havelock Ellis

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.  

Aldous Huxley

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life.  Otherwise it would die of civilization.  

Edmond

K is for "Kenghis Khan."  He was a very nice person.  History has no record of him.  There is a moral in that, somewhere.  

Harlan Ellison

I've made an odd discovery.  Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility.  Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite. 

Bertrand Russell

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.  

Sigmund Freud

When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing. 

Lois McMaster Bujold

Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.

Bennett Cerf

Is man's civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?  

Thomas Carlyle

Modern man is just ancient man... with way better electronics.  

Author unknown

The progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea.  

Edgar Saltus

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.  

Mark Twain

Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, "There's a naked person outside!"  

Mike Nichols

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.  

Arnold Toynbee

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization.  But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.  

Alfred North Whitehead

Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.  

Thor Heyerdahl

Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.  

Author unknown

Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don't.  

Lord Raglan

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

Syrus

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.  

Confucius

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. 

 Henry David  

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.  

Bryan White