Famous Quotes & Sayings

Felix Adler

There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.

Fannie Farmer

Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

Francis Parkman

Spanish civilization crushed the Indian. English civilization scorned and neglected him. French civilization embraced and cherished him.

Jean-Luc Godard

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.

Jim Harrison

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.

Henry David Thoreau

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Nicolas Davila

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

John Eccles

To the brains of our predecessors we owe all of our inheritance of civilization and culture.

Nikola Tesla

Women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

Ray Bradbury

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Ray Bradbury

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Ray Bradbury

Without the library, you have no civilization.

Ralph Adams Cram

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.

Michael Pollan

What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

Oscar Wilde

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

Oscar Wilde

Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.

Oscar Wilde

Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.

Michael Nesmith

The only people who steal are thieves, and that's a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will... return the benefit and reciprocate.

Mason Cooley

Civilization creates discontents; barbarism creates quick endings.

Marie Stopes

A modern and humane civilization must control conception or sink into barbaric cruelty to individuals.

John Ruskin

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I'd like - inviting aliens and have them observe what we do because so much of what we do that we take for granted will just be weird or extraordinary or just plain dumb when observed by an alien from another civilization.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

FM signals and those of broadcast television...travel out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing).

Neil Gaiman

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.

Theodore Roethke

Civilization is over-rated, but there isn't much else.

Theodore Roosevelt

Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny.

Theodore Dreiser

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Margaret Sanger

Organized charity itself is. . . the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents

Margaret Sanger

As an advocate of birth control I wish to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

Margaret Mitchell

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.

Margaret Mitchell

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.

Margaret Mead

Because our civilization is woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas which any one group accepts will be found to contain numerous contradictions.