Quotations: Civilization

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.
Richard Bach

Civilization begins with soap.
Maud van Buren

Is man's civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?
Thomas Carlyle

Civilization will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will.
Winston Churchill

Education is the transmission of civilization.
Will Durant

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums.
Martin H Fischer

One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.
Sigmund Freud

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
Sigmund Freud

If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
Stanley Garn

Civilization is what makes you sick.
Paul Gauguin

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
Aldous Huxley

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
Vince Lombardi

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.
Martin Luther

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
Henry Louis Mencken

You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers

No people is fully civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.
Theodore Roosevelt

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
Bertrand Russell

The progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea.
Edgar Saltus

Civilization: a thin veneer over barbarianism.
John Shanahan

We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way.
George B Shaw

Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.
C.P. Snow

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
Syrus

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
Arnold Toynbee

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara Tuchman

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
Daniel Webster

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Oscar Wilde

Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term 'we' or 'us' and at the same time decreases those labeled 'you' or 'them' until that category has no one left in it.
Howard Winters