Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found,—a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,—a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization.

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

It's too bad our society isn't further along.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

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.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

No arts, no letters - no society.

It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

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

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water.

Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.

"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?"

Civilization is over-rated, but there isn't much else.

We owe the origin and development of human society and, consequently, of culture and civilization, to the fact that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than when performed in isolation.

When people come to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken the longest stride forward since the beginning of time.

Civilization has always been a bust.

If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.

Civilization is the world with its leg asleep.