Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.

Henry David Thoreau

Simplicity is the peak of civilization.

George W. Bush

Any government that chooses to be an ally of terror has also chosen to be an enemy of civilization.

Vince Lombardi

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Paul Johnson

Indeed it is the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical and self-correcting - not only in producing wealth but over the whole range of human activities - that constitutes its most decisive superiority over any of its rivals.

Pliny the Elder

Our civilization depends largely on paper.

Jonah Goldberg

Those who say [Joseph] Padilla should get a civilian trial are essentially saying that if you reject the rules of civilized nations, like those inscribed in the Geneva Convention, you therefore deserve to be treated better, not worse, than those rules require.

Judith Martin

The family dinner table is the cornerstone of civilization and those who 'graze' from refrigerators or in front of the television sets are doomed to remain in a state of savagery.

Joe Orton

Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts.

George Bancroft

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.

George Bancroft

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

Charles Darwin

The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal.

Stuart Symington

If civilians are going to be killed, I would rather have them be their civilians than our civilians.

Storm Jameson

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.

Stewart Brand

Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

Stephen Spender

The only true hope for civilization-the conviction of the individual that his inner life can affect outward events and that, whether or not he does so he is responsible for them.

Stephen Gardiner

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

Stephen Gardiner

The Industrial Revolution was another one of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.

Bill Smith

The lesson I learned from this one is not so much in the details of the network design or preparedness, but the issues we dealt with in facing a situation with civil unrest and security issues for our employees.

Primo Levi

Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.

Terry Eagleton

For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

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.

Jonathan Jakubowicz

The film is 100 percent Venezuelan-funded, ... We made the film at a time when the nation was in a civil war and there was a two-month oil strike. The nation stopped working.

Sigmund Freud

the first man to use abusive language instead of his fists was the founder of civilization.

Sigmund Freud

...the first man to use abusive language instead of his fists was the founder of civilization.

Gregory Benford

The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.

Neal Shusterman

...the first sign of civilization is always trash.

Jose Rizal

Death has always been the first sign of European civilization when introduced in the Pacific.