Oscar Wilde Quotes

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

"Civilization rests on two things," said Hitzig; "the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?"

Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.

What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

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.

No community ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilization

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

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

The progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity…. we are a much better people than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilized state.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

The longer a region is in contact with modern civilization, the higher the degree to which the society in the region is civilized.

Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

Civilization is vastly overrated.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

Civilization begins with distillation

It is inherent in human consciousness to improve. So there is nothing unique about a people searching for and creating ways to make their life better - all civilizations throughout history have done this. What is unique about us in America is the accelerated rate at which we continually search for novelty and progress.

That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.