Civilization Quotes

The civilization of a state should be measured by the amount of suffering it prevents and the degree of happiness it makes possible for its citizens.

Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.

Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.

Simplicity is the peak of civilization.

That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.

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.

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

It is an altogether wrong idea that the modern product of civilization is less susceptible to love. I sometimes think it is the other way.

In societies of low civilization, there is no money.

I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet.

The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

Practical application is found by not looking for it, and one can say that the whole progress of civilization rests on that principle.

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.

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

All of us confront limits of body, talent, temperament. But that is not all. We are, all of us, also constrained by our time, our place, our civilization.

As morality seems to have supplanted civilization, I move on to the spiritual.

Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization.

It's an essential fight librarians are making, an age-old fight; yours is a battle for civilization. It's a fight for our country's founding values.

The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war.

When work goes out of style we may expect to see civilization totter and fall.

There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

Some people die before their time so that others can live. It's a cornerstone of civilization.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

I see in the rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, civilization clashes and the use of religious justification for acts of terror, a clear and present danger to humanity.

Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.

This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

The civilization of cities is breeding a new race of monks who have none of the original religious drive towards chastity, but are just incapable of facing the responsibilities of marriage.

Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies.

There can be no doubt that our descendants will learn to exploit the energy of fusion for peaceful purposes even before its use becomes necessary for the preservation of human civilization.

What’s looming in the shadows of our ignorance and denial is a critique of civilization itself.

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

Civilization is a work of peaceful co-operation.

What we need is a dialogue amongst civilizations.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

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.

Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that's why they can say they're so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!

To us the family is the cornerstone of civilization and must ever be. It is the foundation of proper human relationships.

Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.

Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization-one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?

Civilization has developed executive powers far beyond its understanding.