Civilization That Quotes

#1. 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

#2. A civilization that cannot see the sun and stars will be without religion. There

Liu Cixin

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. There's never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived.

Mike Huckabee

#7. Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.

Andre Malraux

#8. Where two or more are gathered in the name of Man; that is civilization; that is Order; and that is the beginnings of brutality and suffering.

Christopher Dutton

#9. As the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."24

Karen Armstrong

#10. And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse - the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist.

Barry Goldwater

#11. We seem to be trapped by a civilization that has accelerated many physical aspects of evolution but has forgotten that other vital part of man
his mind and his psyche.

Sybil Leek

#12. Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will. You know that as well as I. In this case it was an indolence characterized by a pursuit of knowledge, a frenzied search for answers to everything, no matter the value of such answers.

Steven Erikson

#13. Syria is the proud heir of an ancient civilization that has a unique spectrum of minorities that encompasses Muslims and Christians of various denominations. There are at least ten such ethnic and religious groups.

Ahmed Zewail

#14. It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.

Will Durant

#15. The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#16. A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.

Octavio Paz

#17. There are two competing trends in the world today: one is to create a planetary civilization that is tolerant, scientific, and prosperous, but the other glorifies anarchy and ignorance that could rip the fabric of our society.

Michio Kaku

#18. There is a dichotomy between people who feel economic principles should order human civilization and people who believe humanitarian principles should order human civilization. That essential disagreement is underlying practically all our world drama.

Marianne Williamson

#19. The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state.

Ludwig Von Mises

#20. It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.

Gertrude Stein

#21. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin

#22. When you study history and look at every civilization that has grown up and died off, they all leave one remnant: a major sports colosseum at the heart of their capital. Our fate can be different; but only if we start doing things differently.

Thomas L. Friedman

#23. It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.

Abel Ferrara

#24. In all my teaching I have watched carefully the influence of the tooth-brush, and I am convinced that there are few single agencies of civilization that are more far-reaching.

Booker T. Washington

#25. Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

Meg Rosoff

#26. Of all the works of civilization that interfere with the natural water distribution system, irrigation has been by far the most pervasive and powerful.

Al Gore

#27. Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

Neal Stephenson

#28. India is a land of plenty inhibited by poverty; India has an enthralling, uplifting civilization that sparkles not only in our magnificent art, but also in the enormous creativity and humanity of our daily life in city and village.

Pranab Mukherjee

#29. It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.

H.A.L. Fisher

#30. Any suggestion that Mexicans are fundamentally different from Americans should be taken as racist on its face; America, after all, is a pluralistic society, and Mexico is hardly the alien civilization that some (really, just Samuel Huntington) would suggest.

David Plotz

#31. A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression.

John L. Phillips

#32. What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.

Arthur Erickson

#33. I could never share the fate of a civilization that ostracizes rice. In no way could I trust people who believe yogurt is superior to rice.

Dany Laferriere

#34. I'm thinking about the end of civilization. We may not keep growing like we are now. There must be an end of civilization. That's what I did as a show at the Palais de Tokyo, the 33 scenarios of how this civilization ends.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

#35. We the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency-a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential ... the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising ... Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on earth itself ...

Al Gore

#36. Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#37. Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.

Thomas Sowell

#38. Fight to preserve these traits of civilization, that made us go forward.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke

#39. Without wonder, there's no progress. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. If you don't exercise your capacity for wonder ... well, use it or lose it. A civilization without wonder is a civilization that's starting to atrophy and die.

Brian Hodge

#40. It is supposed to be an axiom of "Western" civilization that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as "order.

Christopher Hitchens

#41. Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.

H.G.Wells

#42. Maui is a beautiful island. It's really the site of an ancient civilization that we've forgotten about, a civilization that existed millions of years ago. When their time came, they left this world and another race was born, the race of human beings.

Frederick Lenz

#43. The Glasgow accent was so strong you could have built a bridge with it and known it would outlast the civilization that spawned it

Val McDermid

#44. The highly respected macroeconomist Jeffrey Sachs has recently made an impassioned and well-argued case in his book The Price of Civilization that mindfulness needs to be at the heart of any attempt to resolve the major problems we face as a country and, by implication, as a world.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#45. There is a gentleness, a lightness, an element of freedom and, in a word, of civilization, that makes this country one of the few countries in the world where, despite everything, you can still breathe freely.

Bernard-Henri Levy

#46. Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get reelected.

Thomas Sowell

#47. People in this civilization are starving in the middle of plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge.

Idries Shah

#48. A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.
A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.

Aime Cesaire

#49. You can judge a civilization by its level of agreement with the green world. When people respect nature, it's a sign of a healthy situation. When they denigrate nature, it's a sign of an unhealthy civilization that will soon perish.

Frederick Lenz

#50. Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#51. '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.'

Jacob K. Javits

#52. We need to evolve and articulate a global ethics for a global civilization that integrates and evolves the passionate truths of every great system of knowledge - pre-modern, modern, and post-modern.

Marc Gafni

#53. The voice in the head that never stops speaking becomes a civilization that is obsessed with form and therefore knows nothing of the most important dimension of human existence: the sacred, the stillness, the formless, the divine.

Eckhart Tolle

#54. A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#55. Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.

Andre Malraux

#56. But you have to understand, my beard is so nasty. I mean, it's the only beard in the history of Western civilization that makes Bob Dylan's beard look good.

Bill Walton

#57. Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.

Henry A. Kissinger

#58. Atlantis was one name for an ancient civilization that went through a terrible catastrophe and that we now have the opportunity to not repeat the same mistakes. We have the opportunity to use our technology responsibly and to steward the earth rather than steer it into its own destruction.

David Wilcock

#59. In practice, the ocean is the world's wildest place because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore.

Rose George

#60. There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

Toni Morrison

#61. A civilization that forsakes its women in any regard or manner does so at its peril. It is only half a civilization, half empty, and it will fall to the cultures and economies of FULL rivals.

William L.J. Galaini

#62. We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ... Knowledge is our destiny.

Jacob Bronowski

#63. This is the tragedy of almost every civilization - that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.

Will Durant

#64. It seemed to me,' said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.

Douglas Adams

#65. Any civilization that doesn't develop space travel dies.

Carl Sagan

#66. No matter where we are or how advanced we think we are, there are elemental issues of our civilization that stories help us work through.

Christian Camargo

#67. How fortunate for civilization, that Beethoven, Michelangelo, Galileo and Faraday were not required by law to attend schools where their total personalities would have been operated upon to make them learn acceptable ways of participating as members of "the group."

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#68. If we did not take action to solve this crisis, it could indeed threaten the future of human civilization. That sounds shrill. It sounds hard to accept. I believe it's deadly accurate. But again, we can solve it.

Al Gore

#69. It is the triumph of civilization that at last communities have obtained such a mastery over natural laws that they drive and control them. The winds, the water, electricity, all aliens that in their wild form were dangerous, are now controlled by human will, and are made useful servants.

Henry Ward Beecher

#70. Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.

Jean Francois Revel

#71. Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold.

David Bowie

#72. Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?

Haruki Murakami

#73. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins. Henry

William Golding

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. Does the thoughtful man suppose that ... the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?

George Santayana

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. It's the Law of God that gave the stability to Christian civilization.

Randall Terry

#85. 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

#86. The artist expresses his love through his works. That is civilization.

Bernard Pomerance

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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