Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sigmund Freud

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

Sigmund Freud

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

Sigmund Freud

The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.

Sigmund Freud

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

Sigmund Freud

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

Shirley Hazzard

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Shereen El Feki

Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations, both ancient and modern.

Phillip Adams

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

Kelly Miller

Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch to be handed from race to race from age to age.

Kathleen Sebelius

As you know we are facing the end of the Western Civilization by having a market based strategy, we are bringing Western Civilization to its knees by selling private insurance plans on a website where people pick and choose.

Terence McKenna

It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.

Terence McKenna

If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.

Terence McKenna

So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.

Terence McKenna

The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.

Terence McKenna

And what we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization.

Terence McKenna

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

James Norman Hall

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

James Lovelock

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

Thomas B. Macaulay

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

Raymond Loewy

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.

Rose Macaulay

what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?

Rose Macaulay

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

Tryon Edwards

No true civilization can be expected permanently to continue which is not based on the great principles of Christianity.

Reynolds Price

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

Reinhold Niebuhr

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.

Madame de Stael

The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

Haruki Murakami

Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?

Haruki Murakami

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

Julius Nyerere

Having come into contact with a civilization which has over-emphasized the freedom of the individual, we are in fact faced with one of the big problems of Africa in the modern world. Our problem is just this: how to get the benefits of European society - benefits that have been brought about by an organization based upon the individual - and yet retain African's own structure of society in which the individual is a member of a kind of fellowship.

Oswald Spengler

Fortunately, at the last hour, there were always a few soldiers to save Civilization.

Winston Churchill

The greatest advances in human civilization have come when we recovered what we had lost: when we learned the lessons of history.

William Walker

The enemies of American civilization-- for such are the enemies of slavery-- seem to be more on the alert than its friends.