George Bernard Shaw Quotes

What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the [Ancient] Greeks?

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

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

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

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.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

The Turkish army will have done its duty when it defends the country from foreign aggression and frees the nation from fanaticism and intellectual slavery. The Turkish nation has fallen far behind the West. The main aim should be to lead it to modern civilization.

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

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

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

Taiwan has been so well developed economically. But we are underdeveloped culturally.

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

Fight to preserve these traits of civilization, that made us go forward.

All that is great in man comes through work; and civilization is its product.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Civilization is a social plague on the planet, and vices are just as necessary to it as is a virus to disease.