Mary Ritter Beard Quotes

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.

I have thought it a sufficient definition of civilization to say, it is the influence of good women.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

History is not merely a procession of people in fancy dress fighting wars. It is crucially the story of man's evolution from grunting cave dweller to serious thinker, from cruelly retributive law to merciful law, from casual barbarism to care and compassion.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

We've been civilized from the beginning. In the desert, it's a baroque city like Paris or Rome.

To me, education is not a commodity. It is a public good, essential to any society with a claim to being civilised.

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

Art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from a man's soul.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

Humanism involves far more than the negation of supernaturalism. It requires an affirmative philosophy . . . translated into a life devoted to one's own improvement and the service of all mankind.

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.

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

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country's spirit.

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

Idealism does not represent a superfluous expression of emotion, but in truth it has been, is, and will be, the premise for what we designate as human culture...Without his idealistic attitude all, even the most dazzling faculties of the intellect, would remain mere intellect just like outward appearance without inner value, and never creative force....The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.

When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level

In this country, there is an opportunity for the development of man's intellectual, cultural, and spiritual potentialities that has never existed before in the history of our species. I mean not simply an opportunity for greatness for a few, but an opportunity for greatness for the many.

Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.

Religion is civilization, the highest.

The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.

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.