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

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.
- Mohandas Gandhi

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
- Thomas Jefferson

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
- Aldous Huxley

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
- Sigmund Freud

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.
- Will Rogers

I think God’s going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.
- Steven Wright

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
- George Orwell

The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.
- Woodrow Wilson

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
- Winston Churchill

The progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea.
- Edgar Saltus

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.
- Richard Bach

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
- 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

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
- Sigmund Freud

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
- Confucius

All the things now enjoyed by civilization have been created by some man and sold by another man before anybody really enjoyed the ;benefits of them.
- James G. Daly

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
- Mark Twain

If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships – the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
- Sigmund Freud

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

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
- Ayn Rand

Civilization is what makes you sick.
- Paul Gauguin

Civilization ceases when we no longer respect and no longer put into their correct places the fundamental values, such as work, family and country such as the individual, honor and religion.
- R. P. Lebret

Progress might have been all right once, but it’s gone on too long.
- Ogden Nash

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
- Bertrand Russell

In the advance of civilization, it is new knowledge which paves the way, and the pavement is eternal.
- W. R. Whitney

When humor goes, there goes civilization.
- Erma Bombeck

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
- Henry David Thoreau

Leash: n, a means by which animals, formerly running wild, are prevented from running tame, also.
- Robert Brault