Famous Quotes & Sayings

George Bernard Shaw

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

George Bernard Shaw

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

George Bernard Shaw

What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it,

George Bernard Shaw

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

George Bernard Shaw

The problem with the press is that they can't tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization.

Gary North

Karl Marx was the foremost hater and most incessant whiner in the history of Western Civilization. He was a spoiled, overeducated brat who never grew up; he just grew more shrill as he grew older. His lifelong hatred and whining have led to the deaths (so far) of perhaps a hundred million people, depending on how many people perished under Mao's tyranny. We will probably never know.

Erich Fromm

We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.

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.

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.