Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sigmund Freud

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

Sigmund Freud

The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.

Sigmund Freud

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

Sigmund Freud

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

Shirley Hazzard

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Shereen El Feki

Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations, both ancient and modern.

Steven Pinker

For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

Steven Weinberg

Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion, should be done and may, in fact, in the end, be our greatest contribution to civilization.

Rose Macaulay

what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?

Rose Macaulay

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

Tryon Edwards

No true civilization can be expected permanently to continue which is not based on the great principles of Christianity.

Reynolds Price

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

Reinhold Niebuhr

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.

Sydney J. Harris

Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in 'getting things done' is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.

Scott Westerfeld

Maybe they didn't want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away all that's left is some story in a history class.

Wallace Stevens

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

William Henry Harrison

Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization?

Walter Bagehot

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards

Walter Benjamin

There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Werner Herzog

We do not see the danger clearly enough that we develop images adequate to our state of civilization. When you watch TV, you know instantly that there's something wrong with the images. When you open a magazine and see the ads, you know there's something wrong with the images. And it's unhealthy and not good and outright dangerous, in my opinion.

Werner Herzog

We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.

Werner Herzog

There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.

Wallace Stegner

I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.

Samuel Smiles

This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.

W. G. Sebald

Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.

W. G. Sebald

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

W. H. Auden

Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

William Graham Sumner

The yearning after equality [in economic outcome] is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.

William Ralph Inge

No healthy civilization can ever be reared on a foundation of devitalized work.

William Ralph Inge

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.

William Ralph Inge

Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal.

William Ralph Inge

Civilization is being poisoned by its own waste products.