Civilization Quotes

There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.

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

Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it.

Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.

I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

There has never been but one question in all civilization-how to keep a few men from saying to many men: You work and earn bread and we will eat it.

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

The discovery of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century implied the beginning of a return to a type of civilization dominated by the eye rather than the ear.

It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?

In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.

I'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.

Social intercourse -- a very limited thing in a half civilized country, becomes in our centers of civilization a great power. . .

You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense.

Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Insects have their own point of view about civilization a man thinks he amounts to a great deal but to a flea or a mosquito a human being is merely something good to eat.

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.

Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.

A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.

Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it'd die of remorse on the third.

The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.

The bookshelf, like the book, has become an integral part of civilization as we know it, its presence in a home practically defining what it means to be civilized, educated, and refined.

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.

It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

Judeo-Christian revelation is not the negative influence secularists proclaim it to be. Rather, it is the taproot of our civilization.

The great question is, can war be outlawed from the world? If so, it would mark the greatest advance in civilization since the Sermon on the Mount.

The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the future of Christian civilisation.

Marriage is the beginning and pinnacle of civilization.

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.

The truest test of civilization, culture and dignity is character and not clothing.

EROEI [energy returned on energy invested, or net energy] is to a civilization what gross profit is to a business, the source of the surplus that supports the entire enterprise.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

The West will continue to conquer peoples, even if it means a confrontation with another civilization, Islam, firmly entrenched where it was 1,400 years ago.

It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair.

For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: this triptych succinctly defines the attractiveness and superiority of Western civilization.

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.