Civilization Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Sigmund Freud
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| Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta. |
| - Brian Aldiss |
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| 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 Author |
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| 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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| Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere. |
| - Richard Bach |
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| 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 |
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| Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup. |
| - Bennett Cerf |
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| Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. |
| - Confucius |
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| We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| 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 |
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| A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. |
| - Sigmund Freud |
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| 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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| The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. |
| - Sigmund Freud |
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| Civilization is what makes you sick. |
| - Paul Gauguin |
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| 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 |
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| Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers. |
| - Abraham Joshua Heschel |
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| Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. |
| - Aldous Huxley |
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| The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. |
| - John Muir |
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| Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long. |
| - Ogden Nash |
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| 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 |
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| The progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea. |
| - Edgar Saltus |
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| Civilization: a thin veneer over barbarianism. |
| - John M. Shanahan |
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| Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. |
| - B.F. Skinner |
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| We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. |
| - Arnold Toynbee |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization. |
| - Daniel Webster |
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| Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. |
| - H.G. Wells |
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| 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 |
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