George Bernard Shaw Civilization Quotations

Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization

Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head.

There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates , who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.

We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way.

I myself have been particularly careful never to say a civil word to the United States. I have scoffed at their inhabitants as a nation of villagers. I have defined the 100 % American as 99 % an idiot. And they adore me.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it,

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.

The problem with the press is that they can't tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization.

In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization.

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty . . . . Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys basic people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.