Famous Quotes & Sayings

Samuel Johnson

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

Robert Payne

Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.

Robert Louis Stevenson

It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

Robert Louis Stevenson

It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very foremost badge of modern civilization--the Urim and Thummim of respectability. . . . So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.

Robert E. Howard

Civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence - whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.

Robert E. Howard

Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.

Robert E. Howard

Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

Robert E. Howard

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

Saul Alinsky

Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.

S. J. Perelman

There is such a thing as too much couth.

Ron Paul

Liberty built civilization. It can rebuild civilization.

Simone de Beauvoir

Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.

Simone Weil

The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate ...

Thomas Mann

Speech is civilization itself.

Steven Erikson

A civilization can easily drown in what it knows as in what doesn't know. Consider,' he continued, Gotho's Folly. Gotho's curse was in being too aware - of everything. Every permutation, every potential. Enough to poison every scan he cast on the world. It availed him naught, and worse, he was aware of even that.

Stephen Hawking

If a superior alien civilization sent us a message saying, 'We'll arrive in a few decades', would we just reply, 'OK, call us when you get here – we'll leave the lights on'? Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI,

Sigmund Freud

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

Sigmund Freud

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Sigmund Freud

The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.

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.

Thor Heyerdahl

We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so.

Robert Andrews Millikan

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants.

Robert A. Heinlein

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.

Toni Morrison

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say - touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.

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.

Victor Davis Hanson

The easily ridiculed, so-so status quo often hides Herculean efforts by those whom we take for granted, and who, working in the shadows, guarantee civilization instead of chaos.