Famous Quotes & Sayings

Neil Gaiman

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

Mark Steyn

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?

Marilyn French

My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.

Nick Bostrom

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

Michael Pollan

What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

Marie Stopes

A modern and humane civilization must control conception or sink into barbaric cruelty to individuals.

Theodore Roethke

Civilization is over-rated, but there isn't much else.

Theodore Roosevelt

Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny.

Theodore Dreiser

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Margaret Sanger

Organized charity itself is. . . the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents

Margaret Sanger

As an advocate of birth control I wish to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

Margaret Mitchell

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.

Margaret Mitchell

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.

Margaret Mead

Because our civilization is woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas which any one group accepts will be found to contain numerous contradictions.

Margaret Mead

I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?

Marcus Garvey

I pray God that we shall never use our physical prowess to oppress the human race, but we will use our strength, physically, morally and otherwise to preserve humanity and civilization.

Marcus Garvey

If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

She lives a sophisticate's life among worldly people. At the slightest excuse she steps out of civilization, naked and relieved, as I should step out of a soiled chemise.

Marjane Satrapi

Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that's why they can say they're so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!

Maurice Strong

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

Matthew Arnold

English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.

Meg Rosoff

Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

Max Born

Science?is so greatly opposed to history and tradition that it cannot be absorbed by our civilization.

Patricia Briggs

Civilization is vastly overrated.

Lance Morrow

Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram.

Nikola Tesla

Women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

John Ruskin

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

Michael Nesmith

The only people who steal are thieves, and that's a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will... return the benefit and reciprocate.

Mason Cooley

Civilization creates discontents; barbarism creates quick endings.

Mercy Otis Warren

The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization.

Margaret Thatcher

Terrorism thrives on a free society. The terrorist uses the feelings in a free society to sap the will of civilization to resist. If the terrorist succeeds, he has won and the whole of free society has lost.