(49 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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(16 votes)   Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.

Thomas Sowell

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(14 votes)   Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

B.F. Skinner

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(14 votes)   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.

Christina Gerogiannis

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(13 votes)   Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don't.

Lord Raglan

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(13 votes)   People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

Edmond de Goncourt

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(117 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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(102 votes)   Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

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

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(92 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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(90 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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(74 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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(59 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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(50 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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(50 votes)   The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

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

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(48 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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