Andrew Dickson White Quotes

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.

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.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.

Civilization, we shall find, like Universalism and Christianity, is anti evolutionary in its effects; it works against the laws and conditions which regulated the earlier stages of man's ascent.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

How can you compare the the masses of Western Europe with our people—so patient, so accustomed to privation?

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

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

Education is the medium by which a people are prepared for the creation of their own particular civilization, and the advancement and glory of their own race.

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

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

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards

The general idea of history seems to be that it is the biography of a society…. History is to the common life of many what biography is to an individual.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

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