Civilization Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

A tablecloth restaurant is still one of the great rewards of civilization.

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

Each new generation is a fresh invasion of savages.

Without the library, you have no civilization.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

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

The biggest farce of man's history has been the argument that wars are fought to save civilization.

Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

When civilization stands at the edge of a cliff, a step forward doesn't make much sense.

Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.

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.

A republic may be called the climate of civilization.

Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?

Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

British physician, West African Countries and Peoples Man's place is higher than the sky. Respect for man is the underlying spirit of civilization.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

California is now close to spending more on prisons than it does on higher education - surely the death warrant of a civilization.

Civilization is being poisoned by its own waste products.

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.

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.

The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.

It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

Slowly, painstakingly, like ants, men would make their paths and civilization and their wars once again, only to have it wash away again.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

[T]he progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea.

Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. We must put question marks along many of our inherited legal dogmas, since they are dangerously out of line with social facts.