Civilization

(34 votes)   People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilization. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilization; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.

Kenneth Clark

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(257 votes)   A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery
1900-1944, French Aviator, Writer

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(255 votes)   A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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(231 votes)   A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery
1900-1944, French Aviator, Writer

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(212 votes)   [The US has] developed two coordinate governing classes: the one, called 'business,' building cities, manufacturing and distributing goods, and holding complete and autocratic power over the livelihood of millions; the other, called 'government,' concerned with preaching and exemplification of spiritual ideals, so caught in a mass of theory, that when it wished to move in a practical world it had to do so by means of a sub rosa political machine.

Thurman Arnold

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(194 votes)   Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

Thomas B. Aldrich
1836-1907, American Writer, Editor

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(108 votes)   I think there are only three things America will be known for 2, 000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball.

Gerald Early
1952-, American Author

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(108 votes)   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?

David Lloyd George

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(106 votes)   I think it would be a good idea.

Mahatama Gandhi
1869-1948, Indian Political, Spiritual Leader

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(105 votes)   Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.

Sigmund Freud
1856-1939, Austrian Physician - Founder of Psychoanalysis

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(101 votes)   Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-PrTs: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

Cyril Connolly
1903-1974, British Critic

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(100 votes)   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

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(100 votes)   The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

Adlai E. Stevenson
1900-1965, American Lawyer, Politician

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(88 votes)   As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(72 votes)   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

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