Civilization Quotes

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.

Alone we are savages, together we are civilization

Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.

The first essential character [of civilization], I should say, is forethought. This, indeed, is what mainly distinguishes men from brutes and adults from children.

Whether science-and indeed civilization in general-can long survive depends upon psychology, that is to say, it depends upon what human beings desire.

The military superiority of Europe to Asia is not an eternal law of nature, as we are tempted to think, and our superiority in civilization is a mere delusion.

As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me.

Teachers are more than any other group the guardians of civilization.

Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization.

War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.

Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization.

They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

The whole idea of civilization as an understandable narrative is a bit nuts. It's the most problematic of delusions.

Any civilization that doesn't develop space travel dies.

I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space.

In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it.

The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one.

The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization was a social organization, slavery.

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.

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.

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

If we can combine our knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness, if we can nurture civilization through roots in the primitive, man's potentialities appear to be unbounded.

We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers.

Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they come from.

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.

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.

How much modern civilization has lost, I think, when they lost the awareness of the billions of stars overhead.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.

When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.

The Net is the new underlying infrastructure for civilization itself.

If I had to fault President [Barack] Obama, I would say that sometimes governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.

In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.

No ancient story, not even Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, has remained as popular through the course of time. The story of Rama appears as old as civilization and has a fresh appeal for every generation.

You can tell a lot about a civilization by the quality of the people found in its jails.

The fast paced nature of our technologically-driven world seems to create issues that would appear to be foreign to ancient civilization.

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.

From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.

Civilization can never be sustainable.

Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.

The first sign on a declining civilization is a decline in the arts.

Horses have made civilization possible.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

This [2016] is not simply another four-year election. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government.