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 has gone on too long. ~Ogden Nash
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. ~Henry David Thoreau
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, The Mismeasure of Man
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, From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race. ~Don Marquis
A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad. ~Theodore Roosevelt
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
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, letter to Count Schomberg, 31 August 1769
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, Animal Dreams
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, The Future of an Illusion
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. ~Frederic Bastiat, The Law
If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn. ~Andrew Mason
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. ~Christina Gerogiannis
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. ~Oscar Wilde
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. ~Charles Darwin
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. ~B.F.Skinner
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. ~Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Civilization is what makes you sick. ~Paul Gauguin
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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