Florence Nightingale Quotes

Woman's success in lifting men out of their way of life nearly resembling that of the beasts who merely hunted and fished for food, who found shelter where they could in jungles, in trees, and caves was a civilizing triumph.

Allen's Law of Civilization: It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.

The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?

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

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?

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only ONE thing: you can become better yourself.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

I think if people read more, that is a better world.

If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.

All culture developed as some wild, raw creature strived to live better and longer.

What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?

Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?

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.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.

History is not just the evolution of technology; it is the evolution of thought.

Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

It is often said that reading is a gift, but to my mind that is an insufficient description, for the size of the gift of reading is so vast that it is difficult to see what is outside its wrapping.

There's this Indian fellow who worked out a cycle like the idea of stone-age, bronze-age, only he did it on an Indian one. The cycle goes from nothing until now and 20th century and then on and right around the cycle until the people are really grooving and then just sinks back into ignorance until it gets back into the beginning again. So the 20th century is a fraction of that cycle, and how many of those cycles has it done yet? It's done as many as you think and all these times it's been through exactly the same things, and it'll be this again.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

For the individual, education is the path to achievement and fulfillment; for the nation, it is a path to a society that is not only free but civilized; and for the world, it is the path to peace - for it is education that places reason over force.