Civilization Quotes

Civilization is a perishable commodity.

What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.

For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?

The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions.

Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive.

In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.

We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.

The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world.

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Technological civilization has now dominated the earth to the point where there is a big question what is going to happen next.

Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

Technological civilizations don't last long. You're all right until you get a printing press. Then a race starts between technology and common sense. And maybe technology always wins.

Business, properly understood, is so central to every aspect of our civilization that Republicans should proudly announce that they are indeed the party of business.

Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.

Burning all the fossil fuels will destroy the planet we know, Creation, the planet of stable climate in which civilization developed.

Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.

There's people who actually have a whole science devoted to what makes a sticky meme and that idea of that question of why some ideas about how civilizations work catch on and others don't.

People are willing to throw our civilization under the bus to discredit the existing system, without any proposed solution to the problems that they're willing to pointing at.

What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the Greeks?

[Barack Obama] believes climate change is a bigger threat to our country than these barbaric Islamic terrorists that have as their organizing principle the destruction of Western civilization.

Give me civilization. I don't want to be pampered.

Okay, so what we really have to recognize and own as Americans is that our way of being is itself perhaps the greatest threat to the continuation of civilization.

With any new civilization... they have to have their own officers and police and governments and all that.

There are certain things for which civilization has no answer. But if you choose to meddle thus, then you must be prepared to facethe consequences, whatever they are.

In fact, the 20th century I think was the most fascinating century and the whole of man civilization because so much happened.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.

The man who first abused his fellows with swear-words instead of bashing their brains out with a club should be counted among those who laid the foundations of civilization.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

When people have to choose between civilization and warm genitals, they choose warm genitals

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.

In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.

There are realities about what it is to be a woman in this world that are born from social convention. No matter how far away you are from civilization, you can't fully get away from that.

Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

To defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilization, you need education...

sharing is the secret of civilization.

For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him

Sentiment is the mightiest force in civilization; not sentimentality, but sentiment. Women will bring this into politics. Home, sweet home, is as powerful on the hustings as at the fireside.

It's hard to imagine a civilization without onions; in one form or another their flavor blends into almost everything in the meal except the desert.

The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.

Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

Remember, for 5,000 years people probably rode those horses. They probably felt that horses were a permanent part of civilization. Everybody has had this moment.

Providence has given the United States the duty of extending Christian civilization. We come as ministering angels, not despots.

A civilization is as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamt by artists.

I am studying ancient civilizations, trying to find what happened to them, finding out why they went into a decline, why they died.

The African tribesman, with his complete contempt for truth and his emphasis on brutality and savagery for others but not for himself, is a no-civilization.