Quotes and Sayings about Civilization
"Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men."
- Jane Addams
(Related: Men, Civilization, Attitude, Living, Respect)
"In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown."
- Felix Adler
(Related: People, Civilization, Wealth, Attention, Country, Labor)
"Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta."
- Brian Aldiss
(Related: Civilization, Man)
"Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades."
- Thomas Bailey Aldrich
(Related: Civilization, Skin)
"Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested."
- Hervey Allen
(Related: Civilization, Aristocracy)
"That is why I come forward tonight without any political label, without any bias, but just simply as an Englishman to say to you: a crime is being committed against civilization."
- John Amery
(Related: Civilization, Being, Crime)
"The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation."
- Aharon Appelfeld
(Related: Civilization, Individuality, Voice, Writer)
"We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter."
- Julian Assange
(Related: History, War, Civilization)
"It is only through books that we partake of the great harvest that is human civilization across the ages."
- Ibrahim Babangida
(Related: Civilization, Books, Harvest)
"The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism."
- Irving Babbitt
(Related: Civilization, Nationalism, Unity)
"In our western civilization we have the glorious example, the great standard of perfection and the teachings of the Christ to guide us. He acts for us as Mediator between our personality and our Soul."
- Edward Bach
(Related: Soul, Civilization, Christ, Example, Perfection, Personality)
"Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere."
- Richard Bach
(Related: Civilization)
"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards."
- Walter Bagehot
(Related: History, Civilization, First)
"A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment."
- Walter Bagehot
(Related: Civilization, Climate, Enjoyment, Luxury, Unconscious)
"Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama."
- George P. Baker
(Related: Civilization, Action, Drama, Pleasure)
"The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force."
- George Bancroft
(Related: Intelligence, Civilization, Progress, Wealth, Force, Measure, Mind)
"We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."
- John Perry Barlow
(Related: Civilization, May, Mind, Will, World)
"If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age."
- Jacques Barzun
(Related: Age, Civilization)
"Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity."
- L. Frank Baum
(Related: Imagination, Civilization, America, Columbus, Electricity, Mankind, Present, State)
"Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization."
- August Bebel
(Related: Civilization, Christianity, Enemy, Liberty)
"You can't leave civilization behind entirely."
- Dirk Benedict
(Related: Civilization)
"A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces."
- Jose Bergamin
(Related: Intelligence, Civilization, Weight)
"Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Sex, Civilization, Sex appeal)
"Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses."
- Georges Bernanos
(Related: Men, Civilization, May)
"Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization."
- Ambrose Bierce
(Related: Civilization)
"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office."
- Ambrose Bierce
(Related: Intelligence, Government, Civilization, Office, Republican)
"Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding."
- Kathryn Bigelow
(Related: Civilization, Country, Illusion, Now, Order, Right, Tension)
"No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing."
- Otto von Bismarck
(Related: Civilization, Christian, Worth)
"We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part."
- Allan Bloom
(Related: Living, Play)
"The disease of mutual distrust among nations is the bane of modern civilization."
- Franz Boas
(Related: Civilization, Disease, Distrust, Nations)
"When humor goes, there goes civilization."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Humor, Civilization)
"The destiny of world civilization depends upon providing a decent standard of living for all mankind."
- Norman Borlaug
(Related: Civilization, Destiny, Living, Mankind, World)
"Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply."
- Norman Borlaug
(Related: Food, Civilization, Today)
"Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet."
- Abdelaziz Bouteflika
(Related: History, Civilization, Defeat, Force)
"A dialogue among civilizations can be seen as a dialogue between the individual and the universal."
- Abdelaziz Bouteflika
"If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium."
- Abdelaziz Bouteflika
(Related: Men, Nations, Years)
"We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex."
- Marion Zimmer Bradley
(Related: Men, Time, Sex, Civilization, Fact, Idiots, Relationships)
"It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: Experience, History, Civilization, Conquest)
"There is but little room for doubt that Egypt led the way in the creation of the earliest known group of civilizations which arose on both sides of the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia in the fourth millennium B.C."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: Creation, Doubt, Land)
"To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: Civilization, Doubt, Facts, Now, Present, Study, Writer)
"There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: Art, Time, Age, Architecture, Civilization, First)
"But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: Civilization, Cities, Fathers, Land, Lonely, Obvious)
"In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: Life, Time, Civilization, Knowledge, Evolution, First, Universe)
"By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: Art, Civilization, Culture)
"Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us."
- David Brin
(Related: People, Civilization, Culture, Past, Self, Talk)
"We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do."
- Jacob Bronowski
(Related: Nature, Imagination, Civilization, Confidence, Future, Man, World)
"The last struggle for our rights, the battle for our civilization, is entirely with ourselves."
- William Wells Brown
(Related: Civilization, Battle, Rights, Struggle)
"Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others."
- William Jennings Bryan
(Related: Civilization, American, Rights, Respect, Will)
"Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences."
- John Buchan
(Related: Life, Civilization, Folk)
"You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn."
- John Buchan
(Related: Civilization, Earth)
"Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members."
- Pearl S. Buck
(Related: Society, People, Civilization, Fear, Deserted, Old, Right)
"But it is a law of life and development in history where two national civilizations meet they fight for ascendancy."
- Bernhard von Bulow
(Related: History, Life, Development, Fight, Law)
"The condition of the tribes which occupy the country set apart for them in the West is highly prosperous, and encourages the hope of their early civilization. They have for the most part abandoned the hunter state and turned their attention to agricultural pursuits."
- Martin Van Buren
(Related: Civilization, Hope, Attention, Country, State)
"Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition."
- T-Bone Burnett
(Related: Business, Civilization, Competition, states, United, Writer)
"Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years."
- John Burroughs
(Related: Science, Civilization, Development, Christianity, Years)
"Iraq is no diversion. It is a place where civilization is taking a decisive stand against chaos and terror, we must not waver."
- George W. Bush
(Related: Civilization, Chaos, Iraq, Terror)
"The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good."
- L. Sprague de Camp
(Related: Nature, Work, Civilization, Engineering, Man, Sense, Struggle)
"I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Civilization, Poison)
"The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: Religion, Civilization, Printing)
"It's very difficult to marry into another civilization."
- Leslie Caron
(Related: Civilization)
"I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities."
- Leslie Caron
(Related: Experience, Americans, Paris)
"I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization."
- George Catlin
(Related: Men, Civilization, Now, Past, Years)
"For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed."
- Whittaker Chambers
(Related: Civilization, Generations, Mankind, Struggle, Will, World)
"At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it."
- Whittaker Chambers
(Related: Faith, Men, Life, Society, Civilization, Man, Question)
"Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting."
- Ralph Chaplin
(Related: Civilization, Blood, Name)
"Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization."
- Winston Churchill
(Related: Civilization, Democracy, Nothing, Prison)
"A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed."
- Emile M. Cioran
(Related: Civilization, Gods)
"All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war."
- Kenneth Clark
(Related: Success, War)
"To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization."
- Adrienne Clarkson
(Related: Genius, Civilization, Paradox)
"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization."
- Georges Clemenceau
(Related: History, Civilization, America, Nation)
"Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours."
- Grover Cleveland
(Related: Intelligence, Women, Civilization, Man, Vote, Want, Woman)
"To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher."
- Arthur Holly Compton
(Related: Science, Civilization, Achievement, Strength, Cooperation, Religious, Will)
"Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: People, Civilization, Bombs)
"Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Civilization, Animals)
"Civilization and profit go hand in hand."
- Calvin Coolidge
(Related: Civilization, Profit)
"Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them."
- Bill Cosby
(Related: Civilization, Rules)
"We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about - farming replacing hunting."
- Jacques Yves Cousteau
(Related: Civilization, Animals, Hunting, Sea)
"Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical."
- Ralph A. Cram
(Related: History, Civilization, Beginning, Class, Destruction, Force)
"The American economic, political, and social organization has given to its citizens the benefits of material prosperity, political liberty, and a wholesome natural equality; and this achievement is a gain, not only to Americans, but to the world and to civilization."
- Herbert Croly
(Related: Equality, Civilization, Achievement, American, Americans, Benefits, Gain, Liberty, Prosperity, World)
"We must not try to force him to take civilization immediately in its complete form, but under just laws, guaranteeing to Indians equal civil laws, the Indian question, a source of such dishonor to our country and of shame to true patriots, will soon be a thing of the past."
- George Crook
(Related: Civilization, Country, Force, Laws, Past, Question, Shame, Will)
"The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war."
- Stanley Crouch
(Related: War, Civilization, Etiquette, Hate)
"The test of civilization is its estimate of women."
- George William Curtis
(Related: Women, Civilization)
"I think governments are the cancer of civilization."
- Chuck D.
(Related: Civilization, Cancer)
"Artificial Intelligence leaves no doubt that it wants its audiences to enter a realm of pure fantasy when it identifies one of the last remaining islands of civilization as New Jersey."
- Godfried Danneels
(Related: Intelligence, Civilization, Audiences, Doubt, Fantasy, Islands)
"Morocco as it is is a very fine place spoiled by civilization."
- Richard H. Davis
(Related: Civilization)
"Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples."
- Christopher Dawson
(Related: Age, History, Civilization, Development, Cooperation, Existence)
"No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion."
- Christopher Dawson
(Related: Civilization, Culture, Doubt, Driving, Force, Passion, Past, Self, Unconscious)
"This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other."
- Christopher Dawson
(Related: Civilization, Freedom)
"Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent."
- Vine Deloria, Jr.
(Related: Power, Morality, Civilization, Knowledge)
"Since the dawn of time, traditional marriage - the union between one man and one woman - has been the building block of civilization, and at no point in our nation's history has that foundation been under more severe attack than now."
- Jim DeMint
(Related: History, Marriage, Time, Civilization, Building, Dawn, Man, Nation, Now, Woman)
"A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization."
- Wilhelm Dilthey
(Related: Society, Civilization, Knowledge, Progress, Causes, Concern)
"The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Civilization, Improvement, Mankind, Security)
"I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good."
- Mary Douglas
(Related: Religion, Civilization, Harm, Today, Years)
"Some scholars have been arguing that a civilizational clash between organized religions is the next step in human history."
- Mary Douglas
(Related: History)
"Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason."
- Theodore Dreiser
(Related: Civilization, Instinct, Reason)
"I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science."
- Ann Druyan
(Related: Science, Technology, Civilization, Culture, Thinking)
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
- Ariel Durant
(Related: Civilization)
"Education is the transmission of civilization."
- Ariel Durant
(Related: Education, Civilization)
"The family is the nucleus of civilization."
- Will Durant
(Related: Family, Civilization)
"Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos."
- Will Durant
(Related: Civilization, Chaos, Liberty, Order)
"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice."
- Will Durant
(Related: Change, Civilization)
"Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity."
- Will Durant
(Related: Civilization, Freedom, Order)
"Education is the transmission of civilization."
- Will Durant
(Related: Education, Civilization)
"All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization."
- Gerald Durrell
(Related: Civilization, Progress, Being, Danger, Grave, Wildlife, World)
"Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences."
- Freeman Dyson
(Related: Life, Technology, Mother, God, Gifts)
"It has been said that the position of woman is the test of civilization, and that of our women was secure. In them was vested our standard of morals and the purity of our blood."
- Charles Eastman
(Related: Women, Civilization, Blood, Morals, Purity, Woman)
"Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization."
- Shirin Ebadi
(Related: Religion, Civilization, Rights, Human rights)
"Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life."
- Mary Baker Eddy
(Related: Life, Science, Society, Civilization, Progress, Chastity, Stability)
"I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: War, People, Civilization, Earth, Will)
"The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place."
- Havelock Ellis
(Related: Civilization)
"The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps."
- Henry Ellis
(Related: Civilization, Doubt, Population, Suicide, Tension)
"The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men."
- Henry Ellis
(Related: Men, Civilization, Machines, Present)
"All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution."
- Henry Ellis
(Related: Time, Civilization, Revolution)
"Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity."
- Jacques Ellul
(Related: Technology, Civilization, Efficiency, Force, Necessity, Order)
"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Civilization, End, Race, Will)
"I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Women, Thought, Civilization, Influence, Measure)
"From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization."
- Friedrich Engels
(Related: Civilization, Day, Driving, First, Greed, Spirit)
"Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today."
- Arthur Erickson
(Related: Time, Technology, Civilization, Space, Today)
"What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority."
- Arthur Erickson
(Related: History, Superiority, Civilization, Man, Sense)
"There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization."
- Arthur Erickson
(Related: Time, Civilization, Attitude, Direction, Present)
"Give me civilization. I don't want to be pampered."
- Jennifer Esposito
(Related: Civilization, Want)
"The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization."
- Oriana Fallaci
(Related: Civilization, Values, Culture, Duty, Principles)
"The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period."
- Oriana Fallaci
(Related: Civilization, Values, Culture, Principles)
"I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."
- Frantz Fanon
(Related: Civilization, Culture, Importance, Language, Support, Weight)
"Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery."
- Fannie Farmer
(Related: Civilization, Progress, Cookery)
"One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person."
- William Feather
(Related: Happiness, Intelligence)
"Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education... no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both."
- Abraham Flexner
(Related: War, Education, Civilization, Choice, Nation, Nations)
"Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both."
- Abraham Flexner
(Related: War, Civilization, Choice, Nation)
"Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them."
- Carlisle Floyd
(Related: Art)
"My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization."
- Richard Foreman
(Related: Civilization, Expression, Feeling, Play, Twilight)
"The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Love, Civilization, Fact, Public, Tolerance)
"Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Civilization, Mind, Sound, State)
"In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters."
- John Fowles
(Related: Civilization, End)
"Monuments and archaeological pieces serve as testimonies of man's greatness and establish a dialogue between civilizations showing the extent to which human beings are linked."
- Vincente Fox
(Related: Greatness, Man, Monuments)
"The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Civilization, First, Insult)
"The first requisite of civilization is that of justice."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Civilization, First, Justice)
"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Civilization, Instinct, Renunciation)
"The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Civilization, Liberty)
"We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Life, Civilization, Pressure, Satisfaction)
"Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Time, Civilization, First, Word)
"A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Civilization, Existence)
"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
- Milton Friedman
(Related: Architecture, Government, Science, Civilization, Agriculture, Literature, Painting)
"The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way."
- Milton Friedman
(Related: Government, Civilization, Order, Self, Theory, World)
"George Bush doesn't represent any civilization!"
- George Galloway
"What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea."
- Mohandas Gandhi
(Related: Civilization, Idea)
"The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization."
- Stephen Gardiner
(Related: Civilization, Culture, Greece)
"The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization."
- Stephen Gardiner
(Related: Civilization, Revolution)
"Civilization is what makes you sick."
- Paul Gauguin
(Related: Civilization)
"What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power."
- Henry George
(Related: Power, Civilization, Wealth)
"Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones."
- Katharine Fullerton Gerould
(Related: Time, Civilization)
"I've managed to dodge the curse. Not all my family have. Of course, music helped me - music is all about civilization, about something worthwhile. It's all about ideas."
- Gordon Getty
(Related: Family, Music, Civilization, Ideas)
"Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Life, Civilization, World, Years)
"The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism."
- Mikhail Gorbachev
(Related: People, Civilization, Capitalism, Contradiction, Dawn, Invention, Socialism)
"The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization."
- Mikhail Gorbachev
(Related: Civilization, Capitalism, Invention)
"As I have said for many years throughout this land, we're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change."
- Al Gore
(Related: Change, Money, Civilization, Borrowing, Future, Land, Oil, Years)
"Hold fast to the Bible. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization and to this we must look as our guide in the future."
- Ulysses S. Grant
(Related: Civilization, Progress, Bible, Future, Influence)
"Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases."
- G. Stanley Hall
(Related: Age, Civilization, Body, Disease, Protection)
"When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it."
- James Norman Hall
(Related: Civilization)
"The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism."
- David Hare
(Related: Civilization)
"In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear."
- Paul Harris
(Related: Civilization, Fear, Emotion, Man, Twilight)
"Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization."
- Zahi Hawass
(Related: Civilization, Culture)
"One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals."
- Rutherford B. Hayes
(Related: People, Civilization, Tests, Treatment)
"Without winners, there wouldn't even be any civilization."
- Woody Hayes
(Related: Civilization)
"Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization."
- Shirley Hazzard
(Related: Civilization, Fear, America, Americans, May)
"For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization."
- Robert A. Heinlein
(Related: Civilization, Politeness)
"Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it."
- Joseph Heller
(Related: Peace, Civilization, Earth, End)
"The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization."
- Arthur Henderson
(Related: History, War, Civilization, World, World war, Years)
"The vast upheaval of the World War set in motion forces that will either destroy civilization or raise mankind to undreamed of heights of human welfare and prosperity."
- Arthur Henderson
(Related: War, Civilization, Mankind, Prosperity, Welfare, Will, World, World war)
"Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive."
- Arthur Henderson
(Related: War, Civilization, Anarchy, Suffering, World, World war, Years)
"He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace."
- Arthur Henderson
(Related: Peace, War, People, Civilization, Danger, Nations, Oppression)
"I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise."
- Arthur Henderson
(Related: Civilization, Values, Anarchy, Nationalism, World)
"If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force."
- Auberon Herbert
(Related: Sacrifice, Civilization, Effort, Example, Force, Influence, Reason)
"Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others."
- Alexander Herzen
(Related: Civilization, First, Order, Slavery)
"We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so."
- Thor Heyerdahl
(Related: Civilization, Navigation, Result)
"Civilization grew in the beginning from the minute that we had communication - particularly communication by sea that enabled people to get inspiration and ideas from each other and to exchange basic raw materials."
- Thor Heyerdahl
(Related: People, Civilization, Inspiration, Ideas, Beginning, Communication, Sea)
"There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti."
- Edmund Hillary
(Related: Civilization)
"The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization."
- Karen Horney
(Related: Civilization)
"We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Women, Civilization, Name, Now, Prostitution, Slavery)
"Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Peace, War, Civilization, Virtue, Crime)
"Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Civilization, Grace, Present, Smile)
"Triumphant science and technology are only at the threshold of man's command over sources of energy so stupendous that, if used for military purposes, they can wipe out our entire civilization."
- Cordell Hull
(Related: Science, Technology, Civilization, Energy, Man, Military)
"From first to last the civilization of America has been bound up with its physical environment."
- Ellsworth Huntington
(Related: Civilization, America, Environment, First)
"It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring."
- Samuel P. Huntington
(Related: Time, Civilization, Will)
"I would seriously question whether anybody is really foolish enough to really say what they mean. Sometimes I think that civilization as we know it would kind of break down if we all were completely honest."
- Elizabeth Hurley
(Related: Civilization, Question)
"God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness."
- Aldous Huxley
(Related: Happiness, God, Civilization, Choice, Medicine)
"The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself."
- Robert Green Ingersoll
(Related: Civilization, Man, Right)
"It's too hard a life for me. I could only do it - check out in that sense - if I checked out somewhere that was luxurious and within hailing distance of civilization."
- Derek Jacobi
(Related: Life, Civilization, Sense)
"One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left."
- Henry James
(Related: Life, Civilization, American, Countries, Wonder)
"The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master."
- Henry James
(Related: Nature, Imagination, Civilization, American, Country, Literary, Secrets, Will, Yield)
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
- Thomas Jefferson
(Related: Civilization, Nation, State, Will)
"A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Civilization)
"No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet."
- Derrick Jensen
(Related: Death, History, Civilization, Poison)
"Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life."
- Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
(Related: Life, War, Civilization, Christianity, Decency, Disease, Enemy, Prejudice, Race)
"I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him."
- Pauline Kael
(Related: Art, Society, Civilization, Vision, Artist, Country, Culture, Future, Importance)
"We will be remembered only if we give to our younger generation a prosperous and safe India, resulting out of economic prosperity coupled with civilizational heritage."
- Abdul Kalam
(Related: Prosperity, Will)
"Civilization never stands still; if in one country it is falling back, in another it is changing, evolving, becoming more complicated, bringing fresh experience to body and mind, breeding new desires, and exploiting Nature's cupboard for their satisfaction."
- Arthur Keith
(Related: Experience, Civilization, Nature, Body, Breeding, Country, Mind, Satisfaction)
"Tolerance is held to be a condition of mind which is encouraged by, and is necessary for, civilization."
- Arthur Keith
(Related: Civilization, Mind, Tolerance)
"It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms."
- Arthur Keith
(Related: Civilization, Experts)
"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."
- Arthur Keith
(Related: Civilization, Christianity, Laws, Man)
"It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length."
- Helen Keller
(Related: Civilization, May, Will, World, Youth)
"The contribution of Islam to history and modern civilization is the product of the efforts of peoples of many races and tongues which came to accept its way of life."
- Aly Khan
(Related: History, Life, Civilization, Islam)
"A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Related: Death, Men, Civilization, Nation, Spiritual)
"I believe with all my heart that civilization has produced nothing finer than a man or woman who thinks and practices true tolerance."
- Frank Knox
(Related: Civilization, Heart, Man, Nothing, Tolerance, Woman)
"Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time."
- Dean Koontz
(Related: Time, People, Civilization, Fact, Right)
"Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former."
- Karl Kraus
(Related: Civilization, Purpose, Agreement, Culture, Existence)
"I would say practical progressive, which means that the Republican party or any political party has got to recognize the problems of a growing and complex industrial civilization. And I don't think the Republican party is really wide awake to that."
- Alf Landon
(Related: Civilization, Party, Problems, Republican)
"History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?"
- Christian Lous Lange
(Related: History, Civilization, Fate)
"The sovereign state has in our times become a lethal danger to human civilization because technical developments enable it to employ an infinite number and variety of means of destruction."
- Christian Lous Lange
(Related: Civilization, Danger, Destruction, Infinite, State, Variety)
"Internationalism is a community theory of society which is founded on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains that respect for a healthy development of human society and of world civilization requires that mankind be organized internationally."
- Christian Lous Lange
(Related: Society, Civilization, Development, Community, Facts, Mankind, Respect, Spiritual, Theory, World)
"Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top."
- Timothy Leary
(Related: Civilization)
"China is a civilization pretending to be a nation."
- Michael Ledeen
(Related: Civilization, Nation)
"Each man has an equal social right to multiply his power of motion by all the social factors of civilization. Private property in any of these factors is inconsistent with this fundamental right; it must, obviously, prove a source of economic despotism and industrial slavery."
- Daniel De Leon
(Related: Power, Civilization, Man, Property, Right, Slavery)
"Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male."
- Max Lerner
(Related: Civilization, Discovery, Fire)
"In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions."
- Max Lerner
(Related: Civilization, Possessions)
"New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you."
- David Letterman
(Related: Civilization)
"I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not."
- Flora Lewis
(Related: Civilization)
"When the toddler does something and there are consequences for his action civilization begins."
- Alicia F. Lieberman
(Related: Civilization, Action, Consequences)
"Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization."
- Charles Lindbergh
(Related: Civilization, Freedom, Lies)
"I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve."
- Charles Lindbergh
(Related: Science, Civilization)
"Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about."
- Seth Lloyd
(Related: History, Life, Sex, Civilization, Being, Information, Thinking, World)
"Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin."
- Henry Cabot Lodge
(Related: Civilization, Freedom, Inheritance, Land, Liberty, Ruin, Trifle, Will)
"Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin."
- Henry Cabot Lodge
(Related: Civilization, Freedom, Inheritance, Land, Liberty, Mankind, Ruin, Trifle, Will)
"Standing, as I believe the United States stands for humanity and civilization, we should exercise every influence of our great country to put a stop to that war which is now raging in Cuba and give to that island once more peace, liberty, and independence."
- Henry Cabot Lodge
(Related: War, Peace, Civilization, Country, Exercise, Independence, Humanity, Influence, Liberty, Now, states, United)
"Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work."
- Vince Lombardi
(Related: Society, Work, Civilization, Commitment, Company, Effort)
"Civilization in its present form hasn't got long."
- James Lovelock
(Related: Civilization, Present)
"Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it'd die of remorse on the third."
- Malcolm Lowry
(Related: God, Civilization, Remorse)
"The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization."
- F. L. Lucas
(Related: Nature, Art, Men, Civilization, Common sense, Literature, World)
"Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family."
- Clare Boothe Luce
(Related: Family, Men, Women, Civilization, Spiritual)
"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines."
- Thomas B. Macaulay
(Related: Poetry, Civilization)
"Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Religion, Civilization, Needs, Today)
"Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists."
- Joseph De Maistre
(Related: Civilization)
"Speech is civilization itself."
- Thomas Mann
(Related: Civilization, Speech)
"If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power."
- Harriet Martineau
(Related: Power, Society, Civilization)
"The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison."
- Karl Marx
(Related: Civilization, Development, Conservation, Destruction, Production)
"Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness."
- Bryant H. McGill
(Related: Art, Beauty, Civilization, Clouds, Courtesy, Cruelty, Man)
"Right now we're working on finishing up Pirates! for the Xbox, we're developing Civilization IV and we've got a couple other games in development that we'll tell you about soon."
- Sid Meier
(Related: Civilization, Development, Games, Now, Right)
"We think we've got it taken care of now. Multiplayer is something that's hard to do in a turn-based game, especially a turn-based game that lasts a long time, like Civilization."
- Sid Meier
(Related: Time, Civilization, Care, Now)
"Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus."
- Thomas Mellon
(Related: Nature, Civilization, Irish, Violence)
"No administration could stop the tidal wave of immigration that swept over the land; no political party could restrain or control the enterprise of our people, and no reasonable man could desire to check the march of civilization."
- Nelson A. Miles
(Related: People, Civilization, Control, Desire, Land, Man, March, Party)
"A Christian people who have for two hundred years kept a race in bondage, deprived of the advantages of civilization and religion, owe them a debt of gratitude which it would seem ungenerous to withhold."
- Nelson A. Miles
(Related: Religion, Gratitude, People, Civilization, Christian, Debt, Race, Years)
"A lot of people thought of me as a threat to Western civilization."
- John Milius
(Related: Thought, People, Civilization)
"Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch to be handed down from race to race from age to age."
- Kelly Millar
(Related: Age, History, Civilization, Nation, Race)
"Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants."
- Robert Millikan
(Related: Civilization)
"Equal and united people can above all become a part of the civilization toward which mankind is moving. If we cannot be at the head of the column leading to such a civilization, there is certainly no need for us to be at is tail."
- Slobodan Milosevic
(Related: People, Civilization, Leading, Mankind, United)
"If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization."
- Ludwig von Mises
(Related: History, Civilization, Property)
"If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed."
- Ludwig von Mises
(Related: Men, War, Civilization, Mankind, Now, Succeed)
"Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man."
- Ludwig von Mises
(Related: Nature, Civilization, Man)
"What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one."
- Margaret Mitchell
(Related: Money, People, Civilization)
"Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity."
- Eugenio Montale
(Related: Civilization, Identity)
"So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die."
- William Morris
(Related: Art, Life, Civilization, Competition, Production, Will)
"A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind."
- John Lothrop Motley
(Related: Civilization, Mind)
"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual."
- John Muir
(Related: Nature, Poetry, Civilization, Spiritual)
"The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era."
- Story Musgrave
(Related: Life, Civilization, Certainty, Statistics)
"The world generally speaking is now drifting on a more and more devastating course towards the absurd target of extermination - or rather, to be more exact - of the northern hemisphere's towns, fields, and the people who have developed our civilization."
- Alva Myrdal
(Related: People, Civilization, Now, World)
"The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized."
- Alva Myrdal
(Related: Age, Civilization, Being)
"The only people who steal are thieves, and that's a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will... return the benefit and reciprocate."
- Michael Nesmith
(Related: People, Civilization, Want, Will)
"Thousands of years and many civilizations have defined a marriage as the union between one man and one woman. With few exceptions, those civilizations that did not follow that perished."
- Randy Neugebauer
(Related: Marriage, Man, Woman, Years)
"There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war."
- Reinhold Niebuhr
(Related: War, Civilization, Aggression, Consequences, Inheritance, May, Result, Tyranny)
"Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles... respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law... or, in a word justice."
- Max Nordau
(Related: Equality, Life, Civilization, Justice, Law, Principles, Property, Punishment, Respect, Word)
"We've persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people - a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it's time to turn the page."
- Barack Obama
(Related: History, Time, War, People, Civilization, Belief, Beginning, Iraq, Now, Remarkable, Responsibility, states, United)
"America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization."
- John O'Hara
(Related: Civilization, America, Being, Country, May)
"If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law."
- John Boyd Orr
(Related: Civilization, Knowledge, Growth, Law, Right)
"The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war."
- John Boyd Orr
(Related: History, War, Civilization)
"Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace."
- John Boyd Orr
(Related: Age, Peace, Civilization, Now, Unity, World)
"Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge."
- John Boyd Orr
(Related: Society, Civilization, Knowledge)
"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization."
- George Orwell
(Related: Civilization, Cities, Doubt, Germany)
"Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell."
- George Orwell
(Related: Civilization, Evil, Heaven, Hell, Mankind)
"If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts."
- Camille Paglia
(Related: Civilization, Living)
"I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses."
- Grace Paley
(Related: Civilization, Senses)
"Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark."
- Theodore Parker
(Related: Civilization, Cities, Light)
"To one who believes that really good industrial conditions are the hope for a machine civilization, nothing is more heartening than to watch conference methods and education replacing police methods."
- Frances Perkins
(Related: Education, Civilization, Hope, Machine, Nothing, Police)
"A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression."
- John L. Phillips
(Related: Civilization, Expression, Will)
"Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not."
- Daniel Pipes
(Related: Civilization, Compromise, Insult, Right, Will)
"AIDS is a global problem and there should be a global solution found by the entire international community. It is really scary to see and imagine our world fall into pieces because we refuse to share and put in the common vestiges of our civilizations."
- Sarah Polley
(Related: Community, Solution, World)
"Well, right now, I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean, probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it."
- Natalie Portman
(Related: Religion, Civilization, Beginning, Circumstances, Culture, Environment, Now, Right)
"A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Civilization, Values, Balance, Man, Question, Will)
"No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end."
- Lawrence Clark Powell
(Related: Civilization, Greatness, End, University, Will, World)
"I believe that the capital of the Republic of Albania is a suitable venue for discussing the dialogue among religions and civilizations, notably in the countries of South East Europe, because we are well familiar with this country's track record of religious tolerance."
- Georgi Purvanov
(Related: Countries, Country, Europe, Religious, Tolerance)
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
- Ayn Rand
(Related: Men, Society, Civilization, Progress, Existence, Laws, Man, Privacy, Public)
"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."
- Ayn Rand
(Related: Men, Morality, Civilization, Altruism)
"The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization."
- Otto Rank
(Related: Soul, Civilization, Creativity, Meaning, Will)
"We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization."
- Herbert Read
(Related: Religion, Civilization, Christianity, May, Will)
"The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists."
- Herbert Read
(Related: Power, Quality, Civilization, Wealth, Artists, Culture, Military, Poets, Worth)
"But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group."
- Herbert Read
(Related: Quality, Civilization, Culture)
"In our civilization, men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they might be considered only women."
- Theodor Reik
(Related: Men, Women, Civilization, Will)
"People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization."
- Agnes Repplier
(Related: People, Civilization, Absurdity)
"It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization."
- Agnes Repplier
(Related: Civilization, Spring, Tea)
"The slum is the measure of civilization."
- Jacob Riis
(Related: Civilization, Measure)
"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."
- Will Rogers
(Related: Civilization, Rights, Will)
"You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way."
- Will Rogers
(Related: War, Civilization)
"What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years."
- Sonny Rollins
(Related: Civilization, Will, Years)
"If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
(Related: Peace, Science, Civilization, Ability, Relationships, World)
"The line of least resistance in the progress of civilization is to make that theoretical postulate real by the continually increasing force of the world's public opinion."
- Elihu Root
(Related: Civilization, Progress, Force, Opinion, Public, Public opinion, World)
"To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism."
- Elihu Root
(Related: War, Civilization, Causes, Fact, Solution)
"America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black."
- Harold Rosenberg
(Related: People, Civilization, Performance, America, Past, Stars, Today, Youth)
"This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization."
- Joseph Rotblat
(Related: War, Civilization, May, Reality, World, World war)
"I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act."
- Joseph Rotblat
(Related: Time, History, Civilization, Development, Act, First, Man, Weapons)
"You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization."
- Alan Rudolph
(Related: Civilization, Individuality, Sense)
"Civilization is the making of civil persons."
- John Ruskin
(Related: Civilization)
"A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization."
- Charles Marion Russell
(Related: Civilization)
"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology."
- Carl Sagan
(Related: Science, Technology, Civilization)
"A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
(Related: Civilization, Knowledge, Beliefs, Logic, Man, Open)
"A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
(Related: Men, Civilization)
"In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles."
- Abdus Salam
(Related: History, Science, Civilization, Respect)
"The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins."
- Jose Saramago
(Related: Change, Civilization, World, Years)
"Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?"
- Pierre Schaeffer
(Related: Music, Civilization)
"Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization."
- Pierre Schaeffer
(Related: Civilization)
"The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance."
- Pierre Schaeffer
(Related: History, Civilization, Hope, Will)
"By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else."
- Solomon Schechter
(Related: Civilization, Man, Vice, Vulgarity)
"Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest."
- Joseph A. Schumpeter
(Related: Civilization, Virtue, Capitalism, Interest, Logic)
"The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented."
- Jack Schwartz
(Related: Civilization, Palestine)
"After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations."
- David Sedaris
(Related: Art, Months, Parents, Potential, State, University)
"Art is the signature of civilizations."
- Beverly Sills
(Related: Art)
"On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men."
- Ignazio Silone
(Related: Men, Civilization, Values, Culture, Living, School, Theories)
"If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology."
- Clifford D. Simak
(Related: Technology, Civilization, Mankind, Present)
"The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian."
- William Gilmore Simms
(Related: Civilization, Development, Progress, Conquest, Law, March, Race)
"Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there."
- Goldwin Smith
(Related: Civilization, Conquest, Duty, England, Question)
"I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing."
- Ian Smith
(Related: Civilization, Hospitals, Language, Schools)
"Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies."
- L. Neil Smith
(Related: Civilization, Lies, Sea, Today)
"Civilization is hideously fragile and there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish."
- Carrie P. Snow
(Related: Civilization)
"Well, we can't afford blindness anymore. There are tens of thousands of thugs who loathe liberty and love death, and want to annihilate Western civilization."
- Tony Snow
(Related: Love, Death, Civilization, Blindness, Liberty, Want)
"The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(Related: War, Civilization, May)
"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."
- Thomas Sowell
(Related: Civilization, Effect)
"If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win."
- Thomas Sowell
(Related: Civilization, Battle)
"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."
- Thomas Sowell
(Related: Civilization, Force)
"Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity."
- Herbert Spencer
(Related: Civilization, Progress)
"It's just a show. It's not the end of Western Civilization. It's chewing gum."
- Jerry Springer
(Related: Civilization, End)
"I ever will profess myself the greatest friend to those whose actions best correspond with their doctrine; which, I am sorry to say, is too seldom the case amongst those nations who pretend most to civilization."
- J. G. Stedman
(Related: Civilization, Friend, Actions, Doctrine, Nations, Will)
"Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization."
- Lincoln Steffens
(Related: Art, Civilization, Flowers)
"Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages."
- Gertrude Stein
(Related: Time, Civilization)
"I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited."
- Patrick Stewart
(Related: Arrogance, First, May, Right)
"It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward."
- Patrick Stewart
(Related: Civilization, March, Now, Will)
"The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Peace, War, Romance, Civilization, Action, Aristocracy, Chivalry, Old)
"When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Time, Civilization, Existence, Language, Nation)
"The city has become a serious menace to our civilization... It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant."
- Josiah Strong
(Related: Civilization)
"The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center."
- Josiah Strong
(Related: Civilization)
"It is not necessary to argue to those for whom I write that the two great needs of mankind, that all men may be lifted up into the light of the highest Christian civilization, are, first, a pure, spiritual Christianity, and second, civil liberty."
- Josiah Strong
(Related: Men, Civilization, Christian, Christianity, First, Liberty, Light, Mankind, May, Needs, Spiritual)
"We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse."
- Maurice Strong
(Related: Civilization, May, Will, World)
"There is every indication that we are to see new developments of the power of aggregated capital to serve civilization, and that the new developments will be made right here in America."
- William Graham Sumner
(Related: Power, Civilization, America, Right, Will)
"The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture."
- Antonio Tabucchi
(Related: Civilization)
"Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic people are the first targets of this kind of aggression."
- Antonio Tabucchi
(Related: People, Aggression, First, Land, Xenophobia)
"We strain to tell Americans and aliens in this country that there's nothing unique about America, nothing unique about American civilization, nothing that requires their allegiance, nothing of great value that they should sacrifice for."
- Tom Tancredo
(Related: Sacrifice, Civilization, America, American, Americans, Country, Nothing, Value)
"I believe that what we are fighting here is not just a small group of people who have hijacked a religion, but it is a civilization bent on destroying ours."
- Tom Tancredo
(Related: Religion, People, Civilization, Fighting)
"Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace."
- Serj Tankian
(Related: Love, Peace, Civilization, Failure)
"It's the Law of God that gave the stability to Christian civilization."
- Randall Terry
(Related: God, Civilization, Christian, Law, Stability)
"It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top."
- Hunter S. Thompson
(Related: Food, Civilization, Law, Right, Sea)
"With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Change, Science, Civilization, Universe, Years)
"While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Men, Civilization, Houses, Kings)
"Justice has nothing to do with victor nations and vanquished nations, but must be a moral standard that all the world's peoples can agree to. To seek this and to achieve it - that is true civilization."
- Hideki Tojo
(Related: Civilization, Justice, Nations, Nothing, World)
"Thus, it was to seek true civilization and true justice for all the peoples of the world, and to view this as the destruction of personal freedom and respect is to be assailed by the hatred and emotion of war, and to make hasty judgments."
- Hideki Tojo
(Related: War, Civilization, Destruction, Emotion, Freedom, Hatred, Justice, Respect, World)
"Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now."
- Arnold J. Toynbee
(Related: History, Now, State, states, United)
"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization."
- Arnold J. Toynbee
(Related: Civilization, Leisure)
"I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills."
- Arnold J. Toynbee
(Related: Civilization)
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
- Arnold J. Toynbee
(Related: Murder, Suicide)
"Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor."
- Arnold J. Toynbee
(Related: Civilization)
"Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization."
- G. M. Trevelyan
(Related: Life, Civilization, Blood, Curiosity)
"I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it - not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization."
- Harry S. Truman
(Related: Faith, Civilization, Future, Ideals, Israel, Nation, Now)
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: History, Science, Thought, Civilization, Books, Dumb, Literature)
"Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Civilization)
"Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live."
- Raoul Vaneigem
(Related: Life, Civilization, Contempt)
"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."
- Alfred de Vigny
(Related: Civilization, Values, Events)
"But you have to understand, my beard is so nasty. I mean, it's the only beard in the history of Western civilization that makes Bob Dylan's beard look good."
- Bill Walton
(Related: History, Civilization)
"The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization."
- Mercy Otis Warren
(Related: Love, Power, Civilization, Lust, Nations)
"When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization."
- Daniel Webster
(Related: Civilization)
"Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization."
- Daniel Webster
(Related: Civilization, Earth, Forget, Labor, Man, Will)
"I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded."
- Simone Weil
(Related: Thought, Civilization, Idea, Christian)
"The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work."
- Simone Weil
(Related: Work, Civilization, Greatness, Lies, Spirituality)
"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."
- Orson Welles
(Related: Women, Civilization, Eating, Girlfriends, Order)
"Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place. The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West."
- Ida B. Wells
(Related: Civilization, Law)
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
- Alfred North Whitehead
(Related: Civilization, Thinking)
"Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized."
- Alfred North Whitehead
"Without adventure civilization is in full decay."
- Alfred North Whitehead
(Related: Civilization, Adventure)
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Civilization, America, Country)
"The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization."
- Robert Anton Wilson
(Related: God, Civilization, Bible, Behavior, Key, May)
"Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages."
- Isaac Mayer Wise
(Related: Civilization, Progress, Being, Difficulties, Now, Problems, Spirit, Years)
"And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization."
- Chauncey Wright
(Related: Men, Science, Genius, Civilization, Progress)
"Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall."
- Frank Lloyd Wright
(Related: Architecture, Life, Men, Civilization, Culture)
"The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it."
- Frank Lloyd Wright
(Related: Civilization)
"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization."
- Frank Lloyd Wright
(Related: Architecture, Art, Mother, Soul, Civilization)
"I think God's going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding."
- Steven Wright
(Related: God, Civilization)
"Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization's history. For some reason that simple truth has evaded everybody."
- Steve Wynn
(Related: Government, History, Truth, Civilization, Being, Living, Reason)
"I feel this is very important for us to have serene buildings because our civilization is chaotic as it is, you see; our whole machine age has brought about a chaos that has to be somehow counterbalanced, I think."
- Minoru Yamasaki
(Related: Age, Civilization, Chaos, Machine)
"I should like to say that I am as proud of my Chinese heritage and background as I am devoted to modern science, a part of human civilization of Western origin, to which I have dedicated and I shall continue to dedicate my work."
- Chen Ning Yang
(Related: Work, Science, Civilization)
"Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years."
- Mao Zedong
(Related: History, Civilization, Struggle, Years)