Quotes · Skopia

21 quotes

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan · 1651

★ 7.1

Lecture · Psychological literature

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Sigmund Freud

Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis · 1917

★ 6.3

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning, It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

Charles Baudelaire

1867

★ 5.2

Essay

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

Havelock Ellis

1922

★ 5.1

Novel

From the earliest times, 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. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread.

W.G. Sebald

The Rings of Saturn · 1995

★ 5.0

Novel

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.

Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead · 1943

★ 3.7

Essay

The three great elements of modern civilisation, Gunpowder, Printing and the Protestant Religion.

Thomas Carlyle

1827

★ 3.6

All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Woman's Sphere · 1868

★ 3.6

Essay · Political literature · Philosophical literature

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The Revolt of the Masses · 1930

★ 3.6

Film · Western (film) · Western

Well, they're saved from the blessings of civilization.

Doc Josiah Boone

Stagecoach · 1939

★ 3.6

Psychological literature

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.

Carl Jung

1933

★ 3.5

Political literature

Of all nations, those submit to civilization with the most difficulty which habitually live by the chase.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 2.2

Lecture

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Henry David Thoreau

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 1.9

Economic literature

Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.

John Maynard Keynes

1919

★ 1.9

Speech · Political speech

Civilization and profits go hand in hand.

Calvin Coolidge

1920

★ 1.9

Autobiography and memoir

The test of civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Pearl S. Buck

1954

★ 1.9

Scientific literature

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

Alfred North Whitehead

1911

★ 1.9

Philosophical literature

I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.

Alfred North Whitehead

Adventures of Ideas · 1933

★ 1.9

Essay · Magazine

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

Toni Morrison

2015

★ 1.2

Interview · Magazine

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 might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.

Albert Einstein

1945

★ 1.1

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