Robert Andrews Millikan Quotes

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

All over the world, we're seeing access to food, clean water, education and healthcare improve; as a result, global innovation is rising as well.

If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference?

Of prosperity mortals can never have enough.

History shows that our way of life is the stronger way. From it has come more wealth, more industry, more happiness, more human enlightenment than from any other way.

He is a great simpleton who imagines that the chief power of wealth is to supply wants. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it creates more wants than it supplies.

Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.

We define poverty as a shortage of material goods, which justifies the production of more and more material goods. It does not occur to us that it might be more realistic to regard it as an aberrant situation in which more material goods are required than can actually be produced, for then the solution would be to create those socio-economic conditions in which less goods rather than more were required.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

More goods and fewer people" is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity's march into the future.

Uncivilized races, and the bravest and most energetic still more than the rest, are averse to continuous labor of an unexciting kind. Yet all real civilization is at this price; without such labor, neither can the mind be disciplined into the habits required by civilized society, nor the material world prepared to receive it.

The major challenge facing us is to elevate our national life to the highest level of civilization and prosperity.

Cultural growth, like economic development rarely comes as a steady advance on all fronts at once.

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

Opulent, civilized, and industrious nations, are greater consumers than poor ones, because they are infinitely greater producers.

Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.

In the affluent society no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries.

The Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities… Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

How many BMWs do you need? How many Rolex watches you gonna wear in your lifetime, for crying out loud? What is it about that kind of desire? I don't understand it.

Luxury is a difficult object to describe - it's been the object of hundreds of years of discussion. We definitely don't need it, but it's good for the soul.