Civilization The 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. 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

#3. Fertility of the soil is the future of civilization.

Albert Howard

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

George Santayana

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. The farmers are the founders of civilization.

Daniel Webster

#14. 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

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

Randall Terry

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.

Mark Twain

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

Bernard Pomerance

#23. 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

#24. Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

Pierre Schaeffer

#25. 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

#26. Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

Mao Zedong

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

Havelock Ellis

#31. The Filipino embraces civilization and lives and thrives in every clime, in contact with every people.

Jose Rizal

#32. Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

Brian W. Aldiss

#33. If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.

Stanley Marion Garn

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

Liu Cixin

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

G.K. Chesterton

#48. Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.

Alphonse De Lamartine

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

Simone Weil

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. The destiny of world civilization depends upon providing a decent standard of living for all mankind.

Norman Borlaug

#58. civilization is the very root cause of the woes of civilization

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Edward Abbey

#64. And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.

Joseph Conrad

#65. 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

#66. Everything we have of value as human beings - as a civilization - is the result of our intelligence.

Stuart J. Russell

#67. To Tom, the march of technology was equivalent to the march of civilization.

Stephen L. Carter

#68. Knowledge is the key to the development of civilization.

Eraldo Banovac

#69. 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

#70. Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization.

Simone Weil

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. The test of the moral quality of a civilization is its treatment of the weak and powerless.

Jerome Frank

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

Ayn Rand

#78. As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.

John Dewey

#79. If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

Thomas Sowell

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. There are anthropogenic state risks at the existential level as well: the longer we live in an internationally anarchic system, the greater the cumulative chance of a thermonuclear Armageddon or of a great war fought with other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, laying waste to civilization.

Nick Bostrom

#83. I had a map on my wall that had a circle around Lubbock and then giant arrows pointing toward New York City and Los Angeles. Written across both arrows were the words 'Toward Civilization.' Of course, by the time I got to New York, I realized there really isn't any civilization.

Barry Corbin

#84. 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

#85. Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play.

Kurt Vonnegut

#86. Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

Max Lerner

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

Antonio Tabucchi

#90. 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

#91. Gay people are not in the habit of thinking of ourselves as leading our civilization, and yet we do.

Judy Grahn

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

Orson F. Whitney

#99. 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

#100. NOISE, n. A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.

Ambrose Bierce