1. A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums. ~Martin H. Fischer
2. A mark of a civilized society is that its norms are always under tension. Open conversations help us to break through the surface to create something new. ~Unknown
3. America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. ~Oscar Wilde
4. Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills. ~Voltaire
5. 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
6. Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. ~Barbara Tuchman
7. Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds, and in opposition to it -- a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals. ~Albert Schweitzer
8. Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. ~Arnold Toynbee
9. Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles...respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the lawor, in a word - justice. ~Max Nordau
10. Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish. ~C.P. Snow
11. 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
12. Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere. ~Richard Bach
13. Education is the transmission of civilization. ~Ariel and Will Durant
14. Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. ~Aldous Huxley
15. Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love. ~Richard Bach
16. Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. ~Henry David Thoreau
17. Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. ~H.G. Wells, The Outline of History
18. I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. ~Thomas Jefferson:
19. Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work. ~Vince Lombardi
20. Is man's civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever? ~Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol III, book V, chapter 7
21. It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. ~Albert Einstein
22. It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. ~Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
23. It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages. ~Alfred North Whitehead
24. I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite. ~Bertrand Russell
25. Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. ~Confucius
26. Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. ~Unknown
27. Modern man is just ancient man... with way better electronics. ~Unknown,
28. 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
29. Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers. ~Abraham Joshua Heschel
30. People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug. ~Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
31. Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity. ~Thor Heyerdahl, Fatu-Hiva
32. Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long. ~Ogden Nash
33. Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. ~B.F.Skinner
34. Society is a made-up formula of what we are supposed to be, kept alive by those who believe in it.... I laugh in the ugly face of society, with all its fabricated dimensions. ~Unknown
35. The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
36. The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. ~Sigmund Freud
37. The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. ~John Muir
38. There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages. ~Mark Twain
39. There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization. ~Felix Adler
40. There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character. ~Henry Louis Mencken
41. 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
42. Underlying the whole scheme of civilization is the confidence men have in each other, confidence in their integrity, confidence in their honesty, confidence in their future. ~Bourke Cockran
43. We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. ~Richard P. Feynman
44. We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs. ~Syrus
45. We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us. ~James Ramsey Ullman
46. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.
47. We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public. ~Bryan White
48. We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. ~Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
49. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. ~Albert Einstein
50. We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
51. We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way. ~George Bernard Shaw
52. What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. ~Henry Havelock Ellis
53. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization. ~Daniel Webster, Remarks on Agriculture
54. When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing. ~Lois McMaster Bujold