Famous Quotes & Sayings

Erich Fromm

Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.

Geoffrey S. Fletcher

From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.

George W. Bush

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

George Steiner

When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation - albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware - of its own best hopes.

George Orwell

Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

Fernand Braudel

The mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization.

Felix Adler

There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.

Fannie Farmer

Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

Francis Parkman

Spanish civilization crushed the Indian. English civilization scorned and neglected him. French civilization embraced and cherished him.

Erma Bombeck

When humor go's, there go's civilization.

Flora Lewis

I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.

Henry Miller

The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world.

Helen Keller

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

Helen Keller

The civilization of a state should be measured by the amount of suffering it prevents and the degree of happiness it makes possible for its citizens.

Catharine Beecher

... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

Anti-terrorism is a fight between justice and evil, civilization and savagery.

An odd thing occurs in the minds of Americans when Indian civilization is mentioned: little or nothing.

Sid Meier

Right now we're working on finishing up Pirates! for the Xbox, we're developing Civilization IV and we've got a couple other games in development that we'll tell you about soon.

Thomas E. Mann

Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.

So what this is is a 'road novel.' Eventually entire civilization (in the South) had been uprooted and people found security only in movement, ... That interested me enormously ... A friend from New Orleans, he said when he read the book, 'This is like Hurricane Katrina.'

There was not a single trail, no sign of civilization, no sign of even local communities ever having been there.

There was no standard reference when the new era of a civilized mankind began. The founding fathers had been forced to start a new world order and as time passed by, many references appear.

Jaron Lanier

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.

Jane McGonigal

We've been playing games since humanity had civilization - there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It's so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.

Frank Herbert

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

H. G. Wells

When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.

H. G. Wells

Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

Jay Roach

There's people who actually have a whole science devoted to what makes a sticky meme and that idea of that question of why some ideas about how civilizations work catch on and others don't.

Jasper Johns

That's what painting does; it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization.

To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

Molly Ivins

California is now close to spending more on prisons than it does on higher education - surely the death warrant of a civilization.

Milton Friedman

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.