Top 100 Civilization Civilization Quotes
#1. There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
Edward Abbey
#2. Civil confusions often spring from trifles but decide great issues.
Aristotle.
#3. No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.
Marcus Garvey
#4. We're a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.
Scott Adams
#5. the more a Christian intentionally cultivates the joy of God in daily life, the more deeply embedded the joy of God will become in American civilization, through him.
Greg Forster
#6. Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.
T Bone Burnett
#7. I do not believe I am exaggerating in affirming that the empire of Russia is a country whose inhabitants are the most miserable on earth, because they suffer at one and the same time the evils of barbarism and of civilization.
Marquis De Custine
#8. The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.
Simone Weil
#9. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.
Rachel Carson
#10. If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves.
James F. Cooper
#12. Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.
G.K. Chesterton
#13. Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit.
Mark Twain
#14. She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
Edith Wharton
#15. Co-operation, like other difficult things, can be learned only by practice: and to be capable of it in great things, a people must be gradually trained to it in small. Now the whole course of advancing civilization is a series of such training.
John Stuart Mill
#16. The proper drinking of Scotch whisky is more than indulgence: it is a toast to civilization, a tribute to the continuity of culture, a manifesto of man's determination to use the resources of nature to refresh mind and body and enjoy to the full the senses with which he has been endowed.
David Daiches
#17. California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life ... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.
J.B. Priestley
#18. A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization.
Wilhelm Dilthey
#19. but the stories on the edge of civilization are horrible things. They're as cruel and violent as the nastiest fairy tales, but they don't have any hope or happily-ever-afters. They have victims, not heroes. The best you get is to escape and go home.
Richard Roberts
#21. If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#22. Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization.
Timothy Leary
#23. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more - if more should be required - the future of human civilization is at stake.
Al Gore
#24. THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#25. If during their education our youths become alienated from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilization, it means there is a very serious educational problem there.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#26. I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths, language, humor, its own loyalties and treacheries.
Jandy Nelson
#27. Knowledge is the key to the development of civilization.
Eraldo Banovac
#28. Is a civilization worth the name, which requires, for its existence the very doubtful prop of a racial legislation and a lynch law?
Mahatma Gandhi
#29. Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#30. Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#31. civilization has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty.
Anton Chekhov
#32. The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much the problem of what you will do with Negro, as what the Negro will do with you and your 'civilization'.
Booker T. Washington
#33. The test of the moral quality of a civilization is its treatment of the weak and powerless.
Jerome Frank
#34. SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.
Ambrose Bierce
#35. Art is neither a muscle nor a cure for ugliness. Ugliness has its own reasons and convictions to stay here. Art has a patience of a civilized, patience to withhold the gentleness of the civilization.
Ashutosh Gupta
#36. Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.
Tom Robbins
#37. Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization.
Simone Weil
#38. Adoration is a sign of an infant civilization.
Toba Beta
#39. while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.
John Mark Reynolds
#40. To effectively contain a civilization's development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.
Liu Cixin
#41. To Tom, the march of technology was equivalent to the march of civilization.
Stephen L. Carter
#42. Everything we have of value as human beings - as a civilization - is the result of our intelligence.
Stuart J. Russell
#43. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It
Mark Twain
#44. And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.
Joseph Conrad
#45. Terrorism thrives on a free society. The terrorist uses the feelings in a free society to sap the will of civilization to resist. If the terrorist succeeds, he has won and the whole of free society has lost.
Margaret Thatcher
#46. We will hope that future historians will explain the morbid symptoms of present-day society as the childhood ailments of an aspiring humanity, due entirely to the excessive speed at which civilization was advancing.
Albert Einstein
#47. If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.
Clifford D. Simak
#48. In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.
Samuel P. Huntington
#50. The destiny of world civilization depends upon providing a decent standard of living for all mankind.
Norman Borlaug
#51. If we want a great future in this world, we have to take God at his word, and God makes it really clear that society and civilization is held together by the glue of families ... This is where the next generation of human beings are incubated and nurtured and matured - in homes. In families.
Kirk Cameron
#52. The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.
Story Musgrave
#53. Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.
Mark Twain
#54. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy - enforced through the rights of the firstborn son - has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions.
Hanna Rosin
#55. We do not need to explain how the Aryans entered and settled in the Dravidian country, and subjugated and oppressed the Dravidians. Nor do we need to explain how before the Aryans entered the Dravidian country, the Dravidian country had a civilization and arts of the highest rank.
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
#56. The chance of receiving a signal from a civilization exactly as advanced as we are should be minuscule. If they were even a little behind us, they would lack the technological capability to communicate with us at all. So the most likely signal would come from a civilization much more advanced.
Carl Sagan
#57. In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.
James Henry Breasted
#58. We know that we cannot live together without rules which tell us what is right and what is wrong, what is permitted and what is prohibited. We know that it is law which enables men to live together, that creates order out of chaos. We know that law is the glue that holds civilization together.
Robert Kennedy
#59. It's the Law of God that gave the stability to Christian civilization.
Randall Terry
#60. Despite the differences between our species and cultures, there is an order that we all share. The development of a civilization is a scripted event. Minds join together to create new technologies, on its own against threats from the outside, that civilization crumbles.
Becky Chambers
#62. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
#63. Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.
Victor Davis Hanson
#64. Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.
Lauren Willig
#65. The artist expresses his love through his works. That is civilization.
Bernard Pomerance
#66. In all of Western civilization, there have been societies that celebrating the homosexuality, the ancient Greeks. But they, in fact, protected the institution of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. They got the joke. And the American people get the joke.
Ken Blackwell
#67. Reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.
Samuel P. Huntington
#68. Does the thoughtful man suppose that ... the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
George Santayana
#69. I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#70. It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization.
John Trudell
#72. We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.
Havelock Ellis
#73. Fertility of the soil is the future of civilization.
Albert Howard
#74. The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#75. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.
Joe Haldeman
#76. To me, every fundamentalist Muslim, no matter how peaceable in his own behavior, is part of a murderous movement and is thus, in some fashion, a foot soldier in the war that bin Laden has launched against civilization.
Daniel Pipes
#77. How are we ever going to understand what happens when a civilization comes apart at the seams, as it did in Germany, if we fail to see the most glaring distinctions, such as the gender gap?
Ruth Kluger
#78. A civilization that cannot see the sun and stars will be without religion. There
Liu Cixin
#79. If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
Stanley Marion Garn
#80. Statistically it's a certainty there are hugely advanced civilizations, intelligences, life forms out there. I believe they're so advanced they're even doing interstellar travel. I believe it's possible they even came here.
Story Musgrave
#81. Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
Brian W. Aldiss
#82. The Filipino embraces civilization and lives and thrives in every clime, in contact with every people.
Jose Rizal
#83. The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
Havelock Ellis
#85. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
Sigmund Freud
#86. Ambitious people understand intelligent people far better than intelligent people understand ambitious people; therefore, ambition will always triumph over intelligence. Once you appreciate this reality, civilization becomes clearer and unfortunately, more distressing.
D.A. Blankinship
#87. In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.
Elon Musk
#88. The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid.
Gever Tulley
#89. Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about.
Seth Lloyd
#90. I've been asked about UFOs and I've said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization.
Gene Cernan
#92. Their most notable defect was that they considered work a virtue, even manual labor. They were materialists, conquerors, and they were infused with a messianic enthusiasm for reforming those who did not think as they did; they did not, however, represent an immediate threat to civilization. No
Isabel Allende
#93. There has never been but one question in all civilization-how to keep a few men from saying to many men: You work and earn bread and we will eat it.
Abraham Lincoln
#94. Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.
Mao Zedong
#95. Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
Bryant H. McGill
#96. Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.
Pierre Schaeffer
#97. Civilization tries to persuade us we are going towards something, a distant goal. We have forgotten that our only goal is to live, to live each and every day, and that if we live each and every day, our true goal is achieved.
Jean Giono
#98. Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny.
Theodore Roosevelt
#99. I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.
Flora Lewis
#100. We're losing film, especially in projection, we're losing a great achievement of civilization. A still image and darkness make up 50% of the experience. The still images become movement in your head. That's the magic of cinema.
Laszlo Nemes
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