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| The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. ~ Sigmund Freud |
| Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don’t. ~ Lord Raglan |
| We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs. ~ Syrus |
| We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public. ~ Bryan White |
| Progress might have been all right once, but it’s gone on too long. ~ Ogden Nash |
| Civilization is hideously fragile… there’s not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish. ~ C.P. Snow |
| Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. ~ Confucius |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. ~ Henry David Thoreau, |
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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, |
And the wind shall say "Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."
~ T.S. Eliot |
| We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. ~ Albert Einstein |
| 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 |
| K is for "Kenghis Khan." He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere. ~ Harlan Ellison, |
| Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever? ~ Thomas Carlyle, |
| Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. ~ Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, |
| Leash: n, a means by which animals, formerly running wild, are prevented from running tame, also. ~ Robert Brault |
| 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 |
| Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. ~ Aldous Huxley |
| 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 |
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.
~ Barbara Kingsolver, |
| People don’t like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug. ~ Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, |
| [M]odern man is just ancient man… with way better electronics. ~ Author unknown |
| What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. ~ Henry Havelock Ellis |
| Civilization begins with soap. ~ Galveston Times |
| A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums. ~ Martin H. Fischer |
| 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, |
| 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, |
| 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 Unknown |