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

I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing:
And I said, "O years, that meet in tears,
Have ye aught that is worth the knowing?
Science enough and exploring,
Wanderers coming and going,
Matter enough for deploring,
But aught that is worth the knowing?"
~Alfred TennysonCOE

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

And the wind shall say "Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."
~T.S. EliotCDC

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.  ~Henry Havelock Ellis

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.  ~Arnold ToynbeeCUL

People don’t like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.  ~Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 2 March 1861LCD

Animals have these advantages over man:  they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.  ~Voltaire, letter to Count Schomberg, 31 August 1769

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.  ~Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its DiscontentsTPV

Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.  ~Thor Heyerdahl, Fatu-Hiva

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.  ~H.G. Wells, The Outline of HistorySH

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.  ~Mark Twain, quoted in More Maxims of Mark compiled by Merle Johnson, 1927quoteinvestigator.com/2012/05/04/twain-clothes

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 1855LCD

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 Harvey2011mail+research

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~T.S. Eliot, The Rock, 1934

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.  ~Brian AldissPCR

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.  ~Bryan White

Civilization… wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.  ~Richard Bach

A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums.  ~Martin H. FischerFFM

Historically speaking, therefore, [T]he progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea.  ~Edgar Saltus, The Philosophy of DisenchantmentSH

Flowers don’t open to the clock
but to the sunshine spontaneous;
for modern humans that manner
of instinct is now extraneous.
~Terri Guillemets

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.  ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871

Civilization is hideously fragile… there’s not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.  ~C.P. Snow

Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don’t.  ~Lord Raglan

There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.  ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897LCD

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization.  But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.  ~Alfred North WhiteheadCUL

The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.  ~Carol MatthauWL