Top 100 Civilization Is Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Fertility of the soil is the future of civilization.
Albert Howard
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Does the thoughtful man suppose that ... the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
George Santayana
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The artist expresses his love through his works. That is civilization.
Bernard Pomerance
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.
Mao Zedong
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
Brian W. Aldiss
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.
G.K. Chesterton
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Everything we have of value as human beings - as a civilization - is the result of our intelligence.
Stuart J. Russell
#39. Knowledge is the key to the development of civilization.
Eraldo Banovac
#40. 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
#41. Adoration is a sign of an infant civilization.
Toba Beta
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. The test of the moral quality of a civilization is its treatment of the weak and powerless.
Jerome Frank
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand
#49. As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.
John Dewey
#50. Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.
Mark Rowlands
#52. This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture -civilization- is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living thing.
Derrick Jensen
#53. The political technology of the Industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.
Alvin Toffler
#54. Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.
Ben Okri
#55. The foundation of any and every civilization, including our own, is private ownership of the means of production. Whoever wishes to criticize modern civilization, therefore, begins with private property.
Ludwig Von Mises
#56. It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.
George Orwell
#57. I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
Henry David Thoreau
#59. Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
Edward Abbey
#60. The measure of a civilization is how it treats those at the dawn of life, the margins of life and the twilight of life.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#61. We are in a mutually dependent society, called civilization, and government is the oil that keeps it running and the lifeblood that carries oxygen to the various parts of the civic body.
Jack Lessenberry
#62. There's something about the style of living in the country that they feel, "This is what represents me." So style is about the philosophy of how we create our civilization.
David Bowie
#63. There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of a civilization. On the contrary, absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.
Richard M. Weaver
#64. I argue that I don't think it's a moral position to say that civilization is going to collapse, and that's okay. Because that would cause the deaths of billions of people. It's certainly not something I'm willing to accept.
Margaret D. Klein
#65. The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims.
Shashi Tharoor
#66. Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.
Orson F. Whitney
#67. In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.
Henry Ward Beecher
#68. There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.
Werner Herzog
#69. The world of dance is a natural world from which civilization has divorced many of us by making it appear remote - something reserved for the few who have a special talent.
Margot Fonteyn
#70. Men have always wanted to have sex with as many fertile young women as possible. It's part of a man's basic programming. That hasn't changed. Civilization is nothing more than an artificial and very thin veneer hiding our deep-seated primitive urges.
Oliver Markus
#71. 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.
Jack London
#72. Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.
Jacques Ellul
#73. This breakdown in the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles.
Julian Jaynes
#75. Civilizations do fail. We have never seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has, in the past, always passed to another region of the world. But we now for the first time have a single, global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.
John Brockman
#76. The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.
Henry David Thoreau
#77. We owe the origin and development of human society and, consequently, of culture and civilization, to the fact that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than when performed in isolation.
Ludwig Von Mises
#78. If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
Terence McKenna
#79. The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness
Michel Foucault
#80. The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey!
Mark Twain
#81. The acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of Gentile civilization,
Pat Robertson
#82. Our non-co-operation is with the system the English have established in India, with the material civilization and its attendant greed and exploitation of the weak.
Mahatma Gandhi
#83. The cleanest civilization I've ever seen ... and the number one thing you pack for a wedding is a jar of dirt?
M.A. George
#84. There are no defenders of man's mind - in the world's greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle - between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes.
Ayn Rand
#85. Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.
Carl Sagan
#86. Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#87. The sum of the whole matter is this - our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.
Woodrow Wilson
#88. People who design machines and airplanes {or buildings}, no matter how much they believe that what they do is good, the winds of time eventually turn them into tools of industrial civilization. They're cursed dreams. Animation, too. Beautiful yet cursed dreams.
Hayao Miyazaki
#89. Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization
Thomas Huxley
#90. If we cannot come together to pause, to respect our dead and the heroic lives of meaning they led, then ours is truly a civilization lost.
Mark McKinnon
#91. What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
Terence McKenna
#92. Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#93. But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.
James Henry Breasted
#94. Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.
Aldous Huxley
#95. The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.
William Gilmore Simms
#96. The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism ... If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#98. Civilization is refinement of spirit, respect of one's neighbor, tolerance of foreign opinion, courtesy of manner.
Vicente Blasco Ibanez
#99. Love is rarely a hypocrite; but hate
how detect and how guard against it! It lurks where you least expect it; it is created by causes that you can the least foresee; and civilization multiplies its varieties, whilst it favors its disguise.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#100. Politics is the application of Sufism to earthlife ... To refuse to act politically is to starve your children, destroy civilization.
Shamcher Bryn Beorse
