Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry Ward Beecher

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

Henry Ward Beecher

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

Helen Suzman

[To the South African parliament:] I do not know why we equate - and with the examples before us - a white skin with civilization.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.

John Maynard Keynes

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.

John Malkovich

Some people die before their time so that others can live. It's a cornerstone of civilization.

John Lothrop Motley

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

John Banville

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

There was not a single trail, no sign of civilization, no sign of even local communities ever having been there.

There was no standard reference when the new era of a civilized mankind began. The founding fathers had been forced to start a new world order and as time passed by, many references appear.

David Mitchell

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been.

It seems to me we are now, since 1789, going through the same sort of process of regeneration the Roman world went through between 300 and 500. It is only to be hoped all civilization will not again be destroyed by the anarchists.

Mel Gibson

I don't think we're crumbling as a civilization, but this is not our finest hour, and it's good to be mindful that we're all susceptible to fall and to look at what are the earmarks of a civilization on the wane. What are they - destruction of the environment? Conspicuous consumption? Heard of those?

Ludwig von Mises

The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle.

Ludwig von Mises

Civilization is a work of peaceful co-operation.

Ludwig von Mises

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

Cynthia Ozick

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

Stephen Hawking

I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves.

Karel Capek

The sole perfection which modern civilization attains is a mechanical one; machines are splendid and flawless, but the life which serves them or is served by them, is neither superb nor brilliant, nor more perfect nor more graceful; nor is the work of the machines perfect; only they, the machines, are like gods.