Civilization Quotes - Page 6

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.

The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.

When we were on trees, others had lived in skies.
When we reach skies, descendant of primitives will someday convey this message.

It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it's people who are not willing to hurt other people because the other people are different.

I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive.

And here was the moment. The end of it all, for civilization was merely another name for friendship, and friendship was coming to an end.

They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.

There’s just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.

Civilization transformed man from a food gatherer to a gatherer of pieces of paper: diplomas, employment contracts, money, etc.

Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

Passion and courtesy are two polar opposite traits that serve to balance each other into a full-blooded whole.

Without socialization, passion is a crude barbarian, and without passion, the elegant and polite are dead.

Allow both passion and courtesy into your life in equal measure, and be complete.

(When asked what he thought of Western civilization): 'I think it would be a good idea.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Living in a world where people measure their happiness by self-indulgence and decadence, Is like watching a whole society being pushed into the abyss of perpetual decay and aberrations.

We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time.

One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.

In civilized societies, if you are offended by a cartoon, you do not burn flags, take up guns and raid buildings, chant death to your opponents, or threaten suicide bombings. You write a letter to the editor.

I thought society would do the right thing. Now I look around and I think - society never does the right thing. Sometimes people do the right thing. Sometimes one person makes a difference. But civilization has rules, and I've learned them well - never be helpless, never be sick, never be poor.

The true mark of English conversation is not being able to tell when you've been insulted. I think the more sophisticated society becomes, the more it hides behind the masks it manufactures.