Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ludwig von Mises

We owe the origin and development of human society and, consequently, of culture and civilization, to the fact that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than when performed in isolation.

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.

Ludwig von Mises

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

David Gerrold

You can tell a lot about a civilization by the quality of the people found in its jails.

David Gemmell

If you look at any ancient civilization, they've all used fantasy stories to train the young.

David Bohm

The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.

Peter Abrahams

Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization - is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it?

Abel Ferrara

It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.

John Eccles

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

I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.

Arnold J. Toynbee

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Cynthia Ozick

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

Cyril Connolly

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Cyril Connolly

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Cyril Connolly

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.

Cornel West

Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.

Cormac McCarthy

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

Clifford Stoll

If we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

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.

Joel Salatin

You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.

Kurt Vonnegut

I would have been dead if it weren't for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline.

Kurt Vonnegut

Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.

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.