Famous Quotes & Sayings

Christopher Dawson

This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other

Christopher Dawson

Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.

Havelock Ellis

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

Havelock Ellis

There is nothing more fragile than civilization.

Havelock Ellis

There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.

Henry David Thoreau

We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

Henry David Thoreau

Simplicity is the peak of civilization.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.

Gregory David Roberts

Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.

Iain Banks

It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.

Guy deBord

In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.

Frank Herbert

Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.

Honore de Balzac

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

Huston Smith

It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.

Immanuel Kant

The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.

J. M. Coetzee

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

H. G. Wells

Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.

Gene Cernan

I've been asked about UFOs and I've said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization.

Jerry Brown

Okay, so what we really have to recognize and own as Americans is that our way of being is itself perhaps the greatest threat to the continuation of civilization.

Stewart Brand

I was a glassy-eyed undergraduate. It was a pillar of local civilization.

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?

Mark Twain

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities

John Cheever

For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.

Will Rogers

You can't say that civilization don't advance; for in every war they kill you a new way.

Northrop Frye

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

Orson Welles

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

Oriana Fallaci

The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

Octavia Butler

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

Octavio Paz

By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death