CIVILIZATION

Quote: Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

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


Quote: Each new generation is a fresh invasion of savages.

Author: Hervey Allen 1889-1949, American Author


Quote: The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.

Author: Jean Baudrillard French Postmodern Philosopher, Writer


Quote: We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

Author: Eric Berne 1910-1970, Canadian Psychiatrist, Writer


Quote: The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Author: Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author


Quote: People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilization. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilization; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.

Author: Kenneth Clark


Quote: 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.

Author: Cyril Connolly 1903-1974, British Critic


Quote: The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

Author: Cyril Connolly 1903-1974, British Critic


Quote: The test of civilization is its estimate of women.

Author: George William Curtis 1824-1892, American Journalist


Quote: Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

Author: Benjamin Disraeli 1804-1881, British Statesman, Prime Minister


Quote: Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

Author: William J. Durant 1885-1981, American Historian, Essayist


Quote: 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.

Author: Gerald Early 1952-, American Author


Quote: Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?

Author: Mary Baker Eddy 1821-1910, American Founder of the Christian Science Church


Quote: All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

Author: Havelock Ellis 1859-1939, British Psychologist


Quote: As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist


Quote: Civilization depends on morality.

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist


Quote: Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist


Quote: 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.

Author: Sigmund Freud 1856-1939, Austrian Physician - Founder of Psychoanalysis


Quote: Civilization...is a matter of imponderables, of delight in the thins of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feeling. Where imponderables, are things of first importance, there is the height of civilization, and, if at the same time, the power of art exists unimpaired, human life has reached a level seldom attained and very seldom surpassed.

Author: Edith Hamilton 1867-1963, American Classical Scholar, Translator


Quote: The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

Author: David Hare 1947-, British Playwright, Director


Quote: Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum.

Author: Vance Havner


Quote: Without winners, there wouldn't even be any civilization.

Author: Woody Hayes American College Football Coach


Quote: The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.

Author: Elbert Hubbard 1859-1915, American Author, Publisher


Quote: One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

Author: Henry James 1843-1916, American Author


Quote: Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the ''dragon,'' in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.

Author: D. H. Lawrence 1885-1930, British Author


Quote: Civilization is just a slow process of learning to be kind.

Author: Charles L. Lucas


Quote: Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.

Author: Henry Miller 1891-1980, American Author


Quote: The word ''civilization'' to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.

Author: Henry Miller 1891-1980, American Author


Quote: Civilization -- a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

Author: Malcolm Muggeridge 1903-1990, British Broadcaster


Quote: To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

Author: George Orwell 1903-1950, British Author, ''Animal Farm''


Quote: A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

Author: Ezra Pound 1885-1972, American Poet, Critic


Quote: Civilization is the making of civil persons.

Author: John Ruskin 1819-1900, British Critic, Social Theorist


Quote: 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.

Author: Antoine De Saint-Exupery 1900-1944, French Aviator, Writer


Quote: A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.

Author: Antoine De Saint-Exupery 1900-1944, French Aviator, Writer


Quote: Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

Author: Wallace Stevens 1879-1955, American Poet


Quote: The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

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


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

Author: Arnold Toynbee 1852-1883, British Economic Historian and Social Reformer


Quote: Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Author: Arnold Toynbee 1852-1883, British Economic Historian and Social Reformer


Quote: To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Author: Arnold Toynbee 1852-1883, British Economic Historian and Social Reformer


Quote: Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Author: Mark Twain 1835-1910, American Humorist, Writer


Quote: The civilized savage is the worst of all savages.

Author: C. J. Weber


Quote: If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

Author: Simone Weil 1910-1943, French Philosopher, Mystic


Quote: Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.

Author: Oscar Wilde 1856-1900, British Author, Wit


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

Author: Sigmund Freud


Quote: Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don't.

Author: Lord Raglan


Quote: We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

Author: Syrus


Quote: We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.

Author: Bryan White


Quote: 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.

Author: Bertrand Russell


Quote: We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Author: Henry David Thoreau


Quote: 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.

Author: Stephen Jay Gould


Quote: We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

Author: Albert Einstein


Quote: When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

Author: Lois McMaster Bujold


Quote: K is for Kenghis Khan. He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.

Author: Harlan Ellison


Quote: Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

Author: Edmond de Goncourt


Quote: 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.

Author: Richard P. Feynman


Quote: Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Author: Timothy Leary


Quote: We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

Author: Carl Sagan


Quote: 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.

Author: Voltaire


Quote: Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

Author: Barbara Kingsolver


Quote: God made the country, and man made the town.

Author: William Cowper


Quote: People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

Author: Edmond de Goncourt


Quote: What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

Author: Henry Havelock Ellis


Quote: 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.

Author: Sigmund Freud


Quote: There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

Author: Mark Twain


Quote: 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.

Author: Christina Gerogiannis


Quote: The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Author: John Muir


Quote: Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

Author: B.F. Skinner


Quote: Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Author: H.G. Wells


Quote: It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

Author: Sigmund Freud


Quote: Civilization is what makes you sick.

Author: Paul Gauguin


Quote: The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.

Author: Carol Matthau


Quote: The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson


Quote: Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

Author: Richard Bach


Quote: We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us.

Author: James Ramsey Ullman


Quote: Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.

Author: Thor Heyerdahl


Quote: If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.

Author: Stanley Garn


Quote: Civilization: a thin veneer over barbarianism.

Author: John M. Shanahan


Quote: 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.

Author: Richard Bach


Quote: Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

Author: Brian Aldiss


Quote: A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Author: Herbert Prochnow


Quote: Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.

Author: Bennett Cerf


Quote: They civilize what's pretty By puttin' up a city Where nothin' that's Pretty can grow.... They civilize left They civilize right Till nothing is left Till nothing is right

Author: Alan Jay Lerner


Quote: Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Author: Confucius


Quote: 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


Quote: Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.

Author: Arnold Toynbee


Quote: Civilization is limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

Author: Mark Twain


Quote: Civilization, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and contentment, and increases the capacity of service.

Author: M. K. Gandhi


Quote: Civilization - the victory of persuasion over force.

Author: Palmer Wright


Quote: Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Author: Alfred North Whitehead


Quote: Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with from people , stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

Author: Will Durant


Quote: Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.

Author: Oscar Wilde


Quote: 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.

Author: Sigmund Freud


Quote: Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

Author: Benjamin Disraeli


Quote: A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

Author: Ezra Pound


Quote: Civilization is , alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, s, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, s, pessaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc.,

Author: Henry Miller


Quote: 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.

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Quote: If Germany, thanks to and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

Author: Simone Weil


Quote: People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.

Author: Kenneth Clark


Quote: The skylines lit up at of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.

Author: Jean Baudrillard


Quote: The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.

Author: John Adams


Quote: You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

Author: John Buchan


Quote: In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.

Author: Jakob Burckhardt


Quote: Civilization and profits go hand in hand.

Author: Calvin Coolidge


Quote: 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.

Author: James Fenimore Cooper


Quote: If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves.

Author: James Fenimore Cooper


Quote: The test of civilization is the estimate of woman. Among savages she is a slave. In the dark ages of Christianity she is a toy and a sentimental goddess. With increasing moral light, and greater liberty, and more universal justice, she begins to develop as an equal human being.

Author: George William Curtis


Quote: ...the first man to use abusive language instead of his fists was the founder of civilization.

Author: Sigmund Freud


Quote: ...it is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.

Author: F. A. Hayek


Quote: It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.

Author: F. A. Hayek


Quote: The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.

Author: Robert G. Ingersoll


Quote: The process of evolution may be described as differentiation of structure and integration of function. The more differentiated and specialized the parts, the more elaborate co-ordination is needed to create a well-balanced whole. The ultimate criterion of the value of a functional whole is the degree of its internal harmony or integratedness, whether the functional whole is a biological species or a civilization or an individual. A whole is defined by the pattern of relations between its parts, not by the sum of its parts; and a civilization is not defined by the sum of its science, technology, art and social organization, but by the total pattern which they form, and the degree of harmonious integration in that pattern.

Author: Arthur Koestler


Quote: For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

Author: H. L. Mencken


Quote: If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

Author: Ludwig von Mises


Quote: Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.

Author: Ludwig von Mises


Quote: Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

Author: Jose Ortega y Gasset


Quote: Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Author: Ayn Rand


Quote: If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Author: Thomas Sowell


Quote: Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge.

Author: Thomas Sowell


Quote: Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

Author: Alfred North Whitehead


Quote: A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

Author: Will Durant


Quote: It takes time to ruin a world, but time is all it takes.

Author: Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle


Quote: Civilized man has always had a great inclination to read his conceptions and feelings into the mind of primitive man; but he has only a limited capacity for understanding the latter's undeveloped mental life and for interpreting, as it were, his nature.

Author: Carl Bucher


Quote: Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.

Author: Carl von Clausewitz


Quote: The rational individualist is not the enemy of benevolence or civility, but their truest exemplar.

Author: David Kelley


Quote: The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion- it is an evil government.

Author: Eric Hoffer


Quote: While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.

Author: Thomas Sowell


Quote: 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.

Author: Thomas Sowell


Quote: Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as individualistic those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.

Author: Thomas Sowell


Quote: When discussing the rise and fall of empires, it is well to mark closely their rate of growth, avoiding the temptation to telescope time and discover too early signs of greatness in a state which we know will one day be great, or to predict too early the collapse of an empire which we know will one day cease to be. The life-span of empires cannot be plotted by events, only by careful diagnosis and ausculation--and as in medicine there is always room for error.

Author: Fernand Braudel


Quote: The fundamental reality of any civilization must be its geographical cradle. Geography dictates its vegetational growth and lays down often impassable frontiers. Civilizations are regions, zones not merely as anthropologists understand them when they talk about the zone of the two-headed ax or the feathered arrow; they are areas which both confine man and undergo constant change through its efforts.

Author: Fernand Braudel


Quote: Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor it it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape--political, economic, social, even geographical--is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

Author: Fernand Braudel


Quote: Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.

Author: Fernand Braudel


Quote: The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.

Author: Leslie A. White


Quote: [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.

Author: Thurman Arnold


Quote: Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

Author: Isaac Asimov


Quote: The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal.

Author: Charles Galton Darwin


Quote: Who ordained that the few should have the land (of Britain) as a prerequisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?

Author: David Lloyd George


Quote: It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.

Author: Lord Macaulay


Quote: Within seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000.

Author: F. J. Lucas


Quote: The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.

Author: Thomas Paine


Quote: It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

Author: Hunter S. Thompson


Quote: Dining is the privilege of civilization...The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress.

Author: Isabella Beeton


Quote: If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.

Author: Orson Welles