Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don’t. – Lord Raglan
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs. – Syrus
We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public. – Bryan White
Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long… – Ogden Nash, “Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours,” New Yorke
Civilization is hideously fragile… there’s not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish. – C.P. Snow
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. – Confucius
Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. – Author and exact wording unknown, I’ve been told this was quoted by Paul H
I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite. – Bertrand Russell
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden
We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. – Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing. – Lois McMaster Bujold
K is for “Kenghis Khan.” He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere. – Harlan Ellison, From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet
Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever? – Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol III, book V, chapter 7
Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. – Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 3 September 1855
Leash: n, a means by which animals, formerly running wild, are prevented from running tame, also. – Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. – Richard P. Feynman
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. – Aldous Huxley
People don’t like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug. – Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 2 March 1861
[M]odern man is just ancient man – with way better electronics. – Author unknown, “A Short History of Breakfast,” from a Jack in the Box tray line
Since the Middle Ages progress in hygiene has been characterized by the conquest of stink. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
