"What is civilization? I answer, the power..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.”

“Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.”

“There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education oftenlabors to silence and obstruct.”

“A woman in love can't be reasonable - or she probably wouldn't be in love.”

“When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.”

“Living in America and, of course, just being women in general, we've got more strength than we think we do.”

“One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.”

“We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.”

“He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to themasterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.”