Famous Quotes & Sayings

Chen Guangcheng

How a society treats its disabled is the true measure of a civilization.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.

Charles Baudelaire

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

Charlie Munger

The interesting thing is the field is so big - it's enormous. One thing a modern civilization needs is energy.

Charles Marion Russell

A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.

Charles Grodin

I don't want to have anything to do with the government. And yet if we don't have any regulations, there goes civilization, there goes security, and there goes protecting you against what people are going to sell you.

Charles Fourier

The method of doubt must be applied to civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.

Charles Fourier

Civilization is a social plague on the planet, and vices are just as necessary to it as is a virus to disease.

Bill Mauldin

Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

Benjamin Hooks

The most enduring contributions made to civilization have not been made by brawn, they have been made by brain.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been.

Edgar Mitchell

We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.

Edgar Mitchell

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.

Derrick Jensen

Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.

Derrick Jensen

From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.

Derrick Jensen

Civilization can never be sustainable.

Derrick Jensen

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

Derrick Jensen

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Abraham Lincoln

The legalized liquor business is the tragedy of our civilization. Alcohol is the greatest and most blighting curse of our modern civilization. The liquor seller is simply and only a privileged malefactor - a criminal.

Lee Child

We know we need civilization and laws and procedures, but isn't it frustrating? Wouldn't it be great if we could just do what we needed to do?

Alexis de Tocqueville

Of all nations, those submit to civilization with the most difficulty which habitually live by the chase.

Albert Schweitzer

The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed.

Albert Schweitzer

Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.

Booker T. Washington

The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much the problem of what you will do with Negro, as what the Negro will do with you and your 'civilization'.

Boyd Rice

What I question is the extent to which any of us truly knows what the facts really are. I mistrust every ideal cherished in western democratic civilization. The words that make others smile and nod in agreement cause me to recoil.

Jane Goodall

I don't care two hoots about civilization. I want to wander in the wild.

James Weldon Johnson

...evil is a force and, like the physical and chemical forces, we cannot annihilate it; we may only change its form. We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen of other forms

Will Durant

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

Jose Rizal

The Filipino embraces civilization and lives and thrives in every clime, in contact with every people.

George William Curtis

The test of civilization is its estimate of women.

Diane Ravitch

Of course, all students should learn African history, as they should learn the history of other continents and major civilizations. But this history should be taught accurately and based on the best scholarship, not ideology or politics.

Dennis Prager

America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life. As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization. And eventually it will not be America. It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.

Denis Hayes

When civilization stands at the edge of a cliff, a step forward doesn't make much sense.