civilization

1.

You can't say civilization don't advance...in every war they kill you a new way.

- Will Rogers

2.

When vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead, it is time to pause and wonder.

- David Brower

3.

In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.

- Wilde, Oscar

4.

Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.

- Mann, Thomas

5.

The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

- Sigmund Freud

6.

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.

- Mitchell, Margaret

7.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

- Whitehead, Alfred North

8.

There are people accusing me that I'm sick, that I'm a danger to morals, western civilization and basically everything under the sun. And they've got these wild stories about me, completely off the wall, completely untrue. They thought them up and it makes you wonder what goes on in their brain, but of course, they don't consider themselves sick. They think they're normal because they don't dress like I do.

- Marilyn Manson

9.

TREE, n. A tall vegetable intended by nature to serve as a penal apparatus, though through a miscarriage of justice most trees bear only a negligible fruit, or none at all. When naturally fruited, the tree is a beneficient agency of civilization and an important factor in public morals. In the stern West and the sensitive South its fruit (white and black respectively) though not eaten, is agreeable to the public taste and, though not exported, profitable to the general welfare. That the legitimate relation of the tree to justice was no discovery of Judge Lynch (who, indeed, conceded it no primacy over the lamp-post and the bridge-girder) is made plain by the following passage from Morryster, who antedated him by two centuries: While in yt londe I was carried to see ye Ghogo tree, whereof I had hearde moch talk; but sayynge yt I saw naught remarkabyll in it, ye hed manne of ye villayge where it grewe made answer as followeth: "Ye tree is not nowe in fruite, but in his seasonne you shall see dependynge fr. his braunches all soch as have affroynted ye King his Majesty." And I was furder tolde yt ye worde "Ghogo" sygnifyeth in yr tong ye same as "rapscal" in our owne. _Trauvells in ye Easte_

- Ambrose Bierce

10.

Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.

- Jack Kerouac

11.

On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.

- Ignazio Silone

12.

Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.

- Agar, Herbert

13.

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

- Hugo, Victor

14.

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

- Arnold Toynbee

15.

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

- James Madison

16.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

- Bagehot, Walter

17.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

- Arnold Toynbee

18.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

- Vaneigem, Raoul

19.

Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.

- Cooper, James F.

20.

Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

- Levi-Strauss, Claude