Civilization Quotes and Sayings

Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.
- Thor Heyerdahl

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
- Henry Havelock Ellis

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
- Henry Louis Mencken

Civilization:  a thin veneer over barbarianism.
- John M. Shanahan

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.
- Martin Luther King

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education… no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
- Abraham Flexner

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.
- Albert Einstein

We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way.
- George Bernard Shaw

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
- Carl Sagan

Good manners  The noise you don’t make when you’re eating soup.
- Bennett Cerf

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gunpowder, Printing, and the Protestant Religion.
- Thomas Carlyle

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

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.
- Bill Cosby

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
- Oliver Wendall Holmes

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
- Sigmund Freud

A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums.
- Martin H. Fischer

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
- B.F.Skinner

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.
- Author Unknown

« Previous Page — Next Page »

  • Search