Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ruth Benedict

Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.

Thomas Mann

Speech is civilization itself.

Steven Erikson

A civilization can easily drown in what it knows as in what doesn't know. Consider,' he continued, Gotho's Folly. Gotho's curse was in being too aware - of everything. Every permutation, every potential. Enough to poison every scan he cast on the world. It availed him naught, and worse, he was aware of even that.

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.

Victor Hugo

Revolution is the larva of civilization.

Victor Hugo

The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.

Vernon Lee

Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

Saul Alinsky

Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.

Roger Ebert

The purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize with other people... For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

Robert M. Hutchins

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death

Robert Green Ingersoll

Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.

Samuel Johnson

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

Robert Payne

Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.

Robert Louis Stevenson

It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

Robert Louis Stevenson

It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very foremost badge of modern civilization--the Urim and Thummim of respectability. . . . So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.

Robert E. Howard

Civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence - whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.

Robert E. Howard

Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.

Robert E. Howard

Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

Robert E. Howard

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

Tom Robbins

But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

Tom Robbins

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

Tom Robbins

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

Tom Robbins

Virtually every advancement made by our species since civilization first peeked out of its nest of stone has been initiated by lone individuals, mavericks who more often than not were ignored, mocked, or viciously persecuted by society and its institutions.

Vaclav Havel

We are the first atheistic and global, all-embracing civilization. You cannot tell whether you are sitting at an airport in Hong Kong or in a hotel in Alaska. Everything is instrumentalized, subjected to a short-term purpose. It is quite possible that in such a situation any sense of a deeper meaning gets lost.

Vaclav Havel

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies.

Stephen Hawking

If a superior alien civilization sent us a message saying, 'We'll arrive in a few decades', would we just reply, 'OK, call us when you get here – we'll leave the lights on'? Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI,

Sigmund Freud

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

Sigmund Freud

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Sigmund Freud

The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.

Sigmund Freud

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.