Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robert Payne

Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.

Wallace Stevens

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

William Henry Harrison

Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization?

Walter Bagehot

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards

Walter Benjamin

There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Werner Herzog

We do not see the danger clearly enough that we develop images adequate to our state of civilization. When you watch TV, you know instantly that there's something wrong with the images. When you open a magazine and see the ads, you know there's something wrong with the images. And it's unhealthy and not good and outright dangerous, in my opinion.

Werner Herzog

We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.

Werner Herzog

There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.

Wallace Stegner

I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.

Samuel Smiles

This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.

W. G. Sebald

Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.

W. G. Sebald

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

W. H. Auden

Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

William Graham Sumner

The yearning after equality [in economic outcome] is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.

Thomas B. Macaulay

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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.

Gordon Getty

Ive managed to dodge the curse. Not all my family have. Of course, music helped me - music is all about civilization, about something worthwhile. Its all about ideas.

Giuseppe Mazzini

Nations, like individuals, live and die; but civilization cannot die.

Herbert Spencer

In societies of low civilization, there is no money.

Herbert Spencer

Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.

Herbert Spencer

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.

Herman Melville

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Henry David Thoreau

Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.

Henry David Thoreau

If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken.

Henry David Thoreau

We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

Henry David Thoreau

What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.

Henry David Thoreau

Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.

Henry David Thoreau

Simplicity is the peak of civilization.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

Jennifer Esposito

Give me civilization. I don't want to be pampered.