The end of the human race will
be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
We shall require a substantially
new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Author: Albert Einstein
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.
Author: Sigmund Freud
People don't like the true and
simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.
Author: Edmond de Goncourt
People sometimes tell me that
they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long
enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation;
but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely
greater.
Author: Kenneth Clark
Progress is man's ability to
complicate simplicity.
Author: Thor Heyerdahl
Savage peoples are ruled by passion,
civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective
natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances,
institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate
in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples,
in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.
Author: Carl von Clausewitz
Social science virtually abhors
the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and
deceptive form of time.
Author: Fernand Braudel
Society attacks early, when the
individual is helpless.
Author: B.F. Skinner
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.
Author: Christina Gerogiannis
The dying process begins the
minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.
Author: Carol Matthau
We should distrust any enterprise
that requires new clothes.
Author: Henry David Thoreau
We've arranged a civilization
in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
Author: Carl Sagan
What we call progress is the
exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
Author: Henry Havelock Ellis
When discussing the rise and
fall of empires, it is well to mark closely their rate of growth, avoiding
the temptation to telescope time and discover too early signs of greatness
in a state which we know will one day be great, or to predict too early
the collapse of an empire which we know will one day cease to be. The life-span
of empires cannot be plotted by events, only by careful diagnosis and ausculation--and
as in medicine there is always room for error.
Author: Fernand Braudel
When you can't do something truly
useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available,
like snappy dressing.
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
While rationalism at the individual
level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social
level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy
of others.
Author: Thomas Sowell
Who ordained that the few should
have the land (of Britain) as a prerequisite; who made 10,000 people owners
of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?
Author: David Lloyd George
Within seven centuries, [the
ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel,
democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography,
philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture,
sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy,
engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state
Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including
children) of perhaps 160,000.
Author: F. J. Lucas
More
Quotes on Civilization
