Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

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.

James A. Baldwin

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

Fulton J. Sheen

The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.

Fulton J. Sheen

Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command.

Fulton J. Sheen

The fact the enemies of God must face is that modern civilization has conquered the world, but in doing so has lost its soul. And in losing its soul it will lose the very world it gained. Even our own so-called Liberal culture in these United States which has tried to avoid complete secularization by leaving little zones of individual freedom is in danger of forgetting that these zones were preserved only because religion was in their soul. And as religion fades so will freedom, for only where the spirit of God is, is there liberty.

Guy deBord

In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.

Immanuel Kant

The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.

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.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.

Golda Meir

Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.

Gregory David Roberts

Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.

Iain Banks

It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.

Hugo Chavez

I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet,

Howard Zinn

There was something horrifying in the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call 'civilization,' we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call 'nations' and armed to apprehend or kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Nicolas Davila

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference to the unique values which created it.

Jawaharlal Nehru

If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.

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.

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.