Civilization Quotes
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Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.
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The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.
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What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
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Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.
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Labor is the fruit of civilization, not the basis of it.
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Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.
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Inarticulate wretches have been behind most of the major advances in civilization. If Vincent Van Gogh had been able to get on with his neighbours, then he might have become an excellent painter-decorator, and received a big turn out at his funeral, and that would be that. But the genes wouldn't let him.
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Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.
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The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.
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In North Africa they had the Arab with the gun and whip, but he could force people to do things ... and he accomplished a tremendous amount of extermination, but he certainly didn't advance that civilization very much.
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The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.
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On Painting Rats, and the Glorification of Them. They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant, and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.
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It seemed so illogical to punish some poor criminal for doing something that civilization taught him how to do so he could have something that civilization taught him how to want. It seemed to him as wrong as if they had hung the gun that shot the man.
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The ancient Egyptians were Negroes. The moral fruit of their civilization is to be counted among the assets of the Black world.
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[My characters are] conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul.
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One cannot deny that in former times man's life had been one of toil and hardship. It is correct to say, therefore, that modern civilization and the progress of science have greatly improved man's life and have brought comfort and ease in their trail.
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It is pretty well settled that the city is the Negro's great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa where the first cities grew up.
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A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.
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If hand-drawn animation is a dying craft, we can't do anything about it. Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era.
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If civilization is to be bound up with material advancement, we must accept its inevitable consequence, loss of freedom in enact proportion to the forward march.
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On Mars, the crumbling remains of ancient civilizations may be found, mutely testifying to the one-time glory of a dying world.
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We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge
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The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.
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America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.
