Flora Lewis Quotes

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

Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.

A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

Cultural standards evolve. The meaning of the public interest also, of course, evolves.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

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?

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

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

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.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.

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

Culture has always been more important than politics. Sometimes culture is a mirror that reflects what is; sometimes it's a search-light pointing the way to what will be.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

The social states of human kinds Are made by multitudes of minds, And after multitudes of years A little human growth appears Worth having, even to the soul Who sees most plain it's not the whole.

Culture does not make people. People make culture.

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?

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

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?"