Famous Quotes & Sayings

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

Octavia Butler

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

Octavio Paz

By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death

Octavio Paz

The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us

Emile M. Cioran

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

Emile M. Cioran

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

Ellen Lupton

Are some free fonts a gift to humanity rather than a blight on typographic civilization ?

Western civilization shapes the content of my films, provides me with subjects that haven't been used before.

Eric Schmidt

There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.

Karel Capek

The sole perfection which modern civilization attains is a mechanical one; machines are splendid and flawless, but the life which serves them or is served by them, is neither superb nor brilliant, nor more perfect nor more graceful; nor is the work of the machines perfect; only they, the machines, are like gods.

Joseph de Maistre

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Kate Millett

When one group rules another, the relationship between the two is political. When such an arrangement is carried out over a long period of time it develops an ideology (feudalism, racism, etc.). All historical civilizations are patriarchies: their ideology is male supremacy.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Civilization does everything for the mind and favors it entirely at the expense of the body.

Narendra Modi

India is a civilization with a history that is thousands of years old.The diversity of India, of our civilization, is actually a thing of beauty, which is something we are extremely proud of.

Napoleon Hill

Practical dreamers have always been and always will be the pattern-makers of civilization.

Napoleon Hill

You may as well know, also, that every great leader, from the dawn of civilization down to the present, was a dreamer.

Paul Valery

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

Mary Douglas

I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good.

Pope Benedict XVI

Civilization is now under the tyranny of relativism.

Pope John Paul II

This is why moral uneasiness is destined to become even more acute. It is obvious that a fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery is at the root of contemporary economics and materialistic civilization, which does not allow the human family to break free from such radically unjust situations.

Pope John Paul II

Side by side with the miseries of underdevelopment...we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissable. This superdevelopment consists in an excessive availability of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups and makes people slaves of "possession" and immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the civilization of consumption, or "consumerism," which involves so much throwing away and waste.

Phillip Adams

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

Thor Heyerdahl

We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so.

Robert Andrews Millikan

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants.

Robert A. Heinlein

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.

Toni Morrison

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say - touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.

S. J. Perelman

There is such a thing as too much couth.

Ron Paul

Liberty built civilization. It can rebuild civilization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Civilization depends on morality.

Shirin Ebadi

Human rights is the fruit of various civilizations.

Shirin Ebadi

Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization.

Shimon Peres

You know when civilization began? With the invention of the mirror.