Famous Quotes & Sayings

L. Neil Smith

Just as liberalism is the main force that drives conservatism and maintains its popularity in some quarters, conservatism is the reason liberalism continues to enjoy the traction that it does in our poor civilization.

P. J. O'Rourke

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

Oscar Wilde

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

Oscar Wilde

Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.

Oscar Wilde

Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.

Mary Baker Eddy

Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.

Mark McKinnon

If we cannot come together to pause, to respect our dead and the heroic lives of meaning they led, then ours is truly a civilization lost.

Mark Twain

Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?

Mark Twain

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

Mark Twain

If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a paper which fails to show up one or more members & beneficiaries of our Civilization as promenading with his shirt-tail up & the rest of his regalia in the wash.

Mark Twain

My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.

Mark Twain

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

John Green

When people have to choose between civilization and warm genitals, they choose warm genitals

P. J. O'Rourke

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

Paul Bowles

[A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.

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.

Christopher Hitchens

The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

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.

Hayao Miyazaki

It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime.

Harry Golden

A tablecloth restaurant is still one of the great rewards of civilization.

George Washington

Freemasonry is an institution founded on eternal reason and truth; whose deep basis is the civilization of mankind, and whose everlasting glory it is to have the immovable support of those two mighty pillars, science and morality.

G. H. Hardy

The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The degree of a nation’s civilization can be seen in the way it treats its prisoners

Jose Rizal

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

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.

Jose Bergamin

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

Mahatma Gandhi

Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.

James Norman Hall

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.