Top 100 Civilisation's Quotes
#1. If there is one country and its people that have contributed most to western civilisation's man-made world continuously for the last 2000 years, it must surely be Italy.
Harry Seidler
#2. Civilisation's like the economy or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it's real, it dies.
David Mitchell
#3. The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilisation's success and the primary reason why cities existwe must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete.
Edward Glaeser
#4. What is the use of this fuss about morality when the issue only involves a horse? The first and most difficult teaching of civilisation concerns man's behaviour to his inferiors. Make humanity gentle or reasonable toward animals, and strife or injustice between human beings would speedily terminate.
Edward Mayhew
#5. That there should be so great a concentration of vitality, so large a world contained within the mind of a single man, must in the end have been fatal to civilisation.
Victor Hugo
#6. It is an ideology born out of hatred and its adherents belong to no religion, culture or civilisation.
Pratibha Patil
#7. Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis.
Zygmunt Bauman
#8. It is so stupid of modern civilisation to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.
Ronald Knox
#9. You can go to civilisation or go to hell, for all I care.' And it felt like the sand was stretching around my feet until that was all there was in the world, until Izman crept further and further away. 'I'm not leaving him for dead.
Alwyn Hamilton
#10. 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.
D.H. Lawrence
#11. The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.
Baron De Montesquieu
#12. Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#13. It has been said that civilization is the process of freeing human beings from each other, and that is true. But it takes people to free each other, because people cannot be freed from each other except by each other. The irony of this cannot be overstated.
Robert Peate
#14. Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.
Peter Greenaway
#15. But one of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilisation has been able to be really human.
G.K. Chesterton
#16. Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.
David Mitchell
#17. Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
Julian Barnes
#18. We've been taught that the renaissance was one of the great golden ages of civilisation. The renaissance was not a golden age, it was the end of a golden age.
Douglas Rushkoff
#19. The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation.
Julian Assange
#20. CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#21. The day you realise how fragile your civilisation across the natural forces is, it may be too late to build a sounder one! All realisations must happen today, right now!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#22. Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.
Altiero Spinelli
#23. With every throb of the climatic pulse which we have felt in Central Asia,, the centre of civilisation has moved this way and that. Each throb has sent pain and decay to the lands whose day was done, life and vigour to those whose day was yet to be.
Ellsworth Huntington
#24. Books, in all their variety, offer the human intellect the means whereby civilisation may be carried triumphantly forward.
Winston Churchill
#25. There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. Don't you think a certain amount of civilisation is necessary before picture-frames will become remunerative? I don't think you could live by them in the bush.
Mrs. Oliphant
#27. Meddling is what we do. It's what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That's the way of it.
Alastair Reynolds
#28. What is civilisation? Idriss once remarked. It's a woman, free to live as she wants.
Gregory David Roberts
#29. So now what?" I ask.
She is quiet for a long time, long enough that I assume she's gone to sleep.
"I think this is just part of it," she says. "Civilisations fall. People keep going.
Daniel H. Wilson
#30. Imagine a civilisation that's way in advance of us wants to communicate with us, and assist us in our development. The information we provide to them must reflect our highest aspirations and ideals, and not just be some crazy person's bizarre politics or religion.
Paul Davies
#31. Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it's a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.
Ian McEwan
#32. I always thought of Djibouti as a place where human history hasn't really begun yet - or perhaps it's already over. There's something in the landscape that's stronger than human civilisation. There's no agriculture, for example, and there are live volcanoes.
Claire Denis
#33. Your power stations, your cars, your creature comforts. Well, you lived too long. The bill's due. Today.
David Mitchell
#34. I think the degree of a nation's civilisation may be measured by the degree of enlightenment of its women.
Helen Keller
#35. It seems like every year Hollywood makes an attempt to retell the Manson story, and I just couldn't be less interested in it. It's not really our crowning achievement as a civilisation. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it just bores me.
John Hawkes
#36. Willpower is what separates us from the animals. It's the capacity to restrain our impulses, resist temptation - do what's right and good for us in the long run, not what we want to do right now. It's central, in fact, to civilisation.
Roy Baumeister
#37. ... perhaps vulgarity is the price one pays for possessing no civilisation of one's own.
Robert Payne
#38. No form of theocracy, whether it's manifested in a violent or non-violent form, is ever good for civilisation, and we have to challenge it in civil society as well as we would challenge Christian-based theocracy, or any other form of bigotry.
Maajid Nawaz
#39. I came in contact with every known Indian anarchist in London. Their bravery impressed me, but I felt that their zeal was misguided. I felt that violence was no remedy for India's ills, and that her civilisation required the use of a different and higher weapon for self-protection.
- Hind Swaraj
Mahatma Gandhi
#40. History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
Tony Judt
#41. For all civilisations are like elaborate campings-out, a complicated picnic in the face of nature's discomforts.
Elizabeth Taylor
#42. Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#43. The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.
Arthur C. Clarke
#44. Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people's altars, spattering them with filth, winking jocosely at them only to justify and conceal one's own rottenness and moral poverty is only possible for a very vain, base, and nasty creature.
Anton Chekhov
#45. We don't really communicate [ ... ]. We talk all right, talk in that strange language we've evolved for the purposes of avoiding communication. That non-language we've created. Perhaps it's a sign that civilisation is regressing. Something is anyway.
Irvine Welsh
#46. I like looking at the countryside as well as anyone ... a little countryside goes a long way, but it's almost like the DNA of a civilisation is in its cities.
Jonathan Meades
#47. And ... and what is civilisation if it isn't people talking to each other over a goddamned beer?
James S.A. Corey
#48. There can be little doubt that in many ways the story of bridge building is the story of civilisation. By it we can readily measure an important part of a people's progress.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#49. Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.
Alan Furst
#50. Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#51. The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last.
Sufjan Stevens
#53. In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.
Henry James Sumner Maine
#54. Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.
Sivananda Saraswati
#55. The central industry of modern civilisation, tending, because of its control over materials, to spread into and ultimately incorporate older industries such as mining, smelting, oil- refining, textiles, rubber, building, and even agriculture in respect to fertilizers and food processing.
John Desmond Bernal
#56. American society is the only one which has passed directly from barbarism into decadence without once knowing civilisation.
Albert Jay Nock
#57. The march of civilisation has given the modern girl a vocabulary and an ability to use it which her grandmother never had
P.G. Wodehouse
#58. In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.
Yukichi Fukuzawa
#59. Most empires of conquest in history have imposed their own civilisation on the conquered ... By comparison the Mongols trod lightly on the world they conquered.
Jack Weatherford
#60. A stable climate is the most fundamental resource of all. No one has yet built a civilisation in an unstable climate
Tom Burke
#61. We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#62. The goal of education should be to dismantle the Middle Pole view, not to reinforce it in the name of the need for a grounding in one's own civilisation.
Jay L. Garfield
#63. THE VEIL OF CIVILISATION was thin indeed, so easily torn away to reveal depravity waiting beneath, waiting, as such things always did, for the first hint of turbulence.
Steven Erikson
#64. One religion, one civilisation, above all is Love and Humanity, respectively.
Vikrmn
#65. Newspaper : A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.
George Bernard Shaw
#66. It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.
Neel Burton
#67. The idea of an Afrikaner people as a cultural entity and religious group with a special language will be retained in South Africa as long as civilisation stands.
P. W. Botha
#68. Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.
Aleister Crowley
#69. But still. It has to end sometime. Wars always do. Everything has to end,' said Josephine, eating another ginger biscuit and getting unexpectedly philosophical. 'Yeah. Things like human civilisation,' I said.
Sophia McDougall
#70. Civilisation consists in giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result. And the false name joined to the true dream does create a new reality. The object does change into something else, because we make it change. We manufacture realities.
Fernando Pessoa
#71. Civilisation has, indeed, become a slaughtering-car crowned by a grinning effigy of Comfort, before which man blindly and voluntarily hurls himself in his own ignorance.
Eugen Sandow
#72. Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation.
Vidkun Quisling
#73. If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!
Richard Dawkins
#74. You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.
Mahatma Gandhi
#75. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.
James Joyce
#76. The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue - and peace of mind.
Henry Williamson
#77. Civilisation isn't a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, recreated daily. It vanishes far more quickly than he even would have thought possible.
Steven Galloway
#78. I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me.
Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency.
Theodore Dalrymple
#79. A call to embrace democracy is the worst insult to a society that is still alien to civilisation. It is like being asked to dance to the tune of mob justice.
Newton Gatambia
#80. We don't know the spiritual advancements long-term veganism - over generations - would have for human life. It would be certainly a different civilisation, and the first one in the whole of our history that would truly deserve the title of being a civilisation.
Donald Watson
#81. Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
Sigmund Freud
#82. All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.
Richard Lamm
#83. This is by far the most serious crisis civilisation has ever faced.
Al Gore
#84. He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars,
Richard Flanagan
#85. I love fashion, beauty, glamour. It's the mark of civilisation.
David LaChapelle
#87. Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
#88. I Will Follow Anyone
And Ask Everyone
To Stand Together
As One Civilisation
Against Terrorism
Widad Akreyi
#89. Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.
Samuel P. Huntington
#90. Man cannot pretend to be higher in ethics, spirituality, advancement, or civilisation than other creatures, and at the same time live by lower standards than the vulture or hyena.
H. Jay Dinshah
#91. Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.
Rachel Cusk
#92. If we're going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.
Elon Musk
#93. There are other, civilised ways of dealing with the matter," Dllenahkh insisted.
Darithiven looked at him with pity. "Then, by your definition, this cannot be civilisation.
Karen Lord
#94. People who foster dependence on illicit drugs such as heroin are regarded among the most unscrupulous pariahs of modern civilisation. In contrast, pushers of licit drugs tend to be viewed as altruistically motivated purveyors of social good.
John Braithwaite
#95. We thought ourselves kings of the ages. Now we find that all our civilisation has been nothing but a brief, brightly lit nursery, where we have played with paper crowns and wooden sceptres.
Frances Hardinge
#96. We were the only humans - the only forms of life, in fact - for hundreds of miles in each direction, unreaching and unreachable as we rocketed back towards civilisation.
Heather James
#97. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)
Bernard Malamud
#98. There's a fundamental difference, if you look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilisation, that's out there exploring the stars ... compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.
Elon Musk
#99. Jesus is absolutely at the centre of Western civilisation and part of my fascination with him is, why? What is it about this particular man and his story?
Simon Callow
#100. Madame Gherardi maintained that love, like most other blessings of civilisation, was a chimaera which we desire the more, the further removed we are from Nature.
W.G. Sebald
