Top 100 Civilization The Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I think there are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball. They're the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced.
Gerald Early
#5. You've no idea how wonderful toilet paper is until it's taken away from you by an unfeeling universe. I think it's the defining characteristic of human civilization, the ability to manufacture something decent to wipe your ass on.
Peter F. Hamilton
#6. The only true hope for civilization-the conviction of the individual that his inner life can affect outward events and that, whether or not he does so he is responsible for them.
Stephen Spender
#7. For most of human civilization, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a generation might pass before a discovery would influence your life, culture or the conduct of nations.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#8. What is the crowning glory of your civilization ... the symbol as clear a statement as the pyramids, the Parthenon, the cathedrals? What is this symbol? What is its name? Its name is Junk. Junk is the rusty, lovely, brilliant symbol of the dying years of your time. Junk is your ultimate landscape.
George Nelson
#9. We are in an unusual predicament as a global civilization. The maximum that is politically feasible, even the maximum that is politically imaginable right now, still falls short of the minimum that is scientifically and ecologically necessary.
Al Gore
#10. So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way.
Ben Fountain
#11. What is true for book publishing is true for civilization: the books that survive the test of time are humanity's backlist, our collective memory.
Jason Epstein
#12. Since the days of cave civilization to the modern day microprocessor civilization, the relation between man and woman remained the same. Then it was at a carnal level. And, today it is still at carnal level.
Girdhar Joshi
#13. It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
Ludwig Von Mises
#14. English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.
Matthew Arnold
#15. What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.
Elie Wiesel
#16. Every time a new nation, America or Russia for instance, advances toward civilization, the human race perfects itself; every time an inferior class emerges from enslavement and degradation, the human race again perfects itself.
Madame De Stael
#17. In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#18. No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit..
Sigmund Freud
#19. This is the age of the apartment. Not only in the great cities, but in the smaller centers of civilization the apartment has come to stay ... A decade ago the apartment was considered a sorry makeshift in America, though it has been successful abroad for more years than you would believe.
Elsie De Wolfe
#20. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#21. American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.
Ishmael Reed
#22. The point of asylum is not to declare to the world what country you think is the pinnacle of civilization. The point of asylum is to find a country that's both willing and able to protect you from political persecution. In no way is asylum an endorsement of a country's politics, laws, or values.
Glenn Greenwald
#23. Is not the history of real civilization the slow and gradual emancipation of the intellect, of the judgment, from the mastery of passion? Is not that man civilized whose reason sits the crowned monarch of his brain - whose passions are his servants?
Robert Green Ingersoll
#24. This is the story of the end of the world, the rise and fall of human civilization, the creation of the Partials and the death of everything else.
Dan Wells
#25. With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.
William Irwin Thompson
#26. Doubt is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization-the him night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith that springs from conflict is often the strongest and best.
Ross Turnbull
#27. In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#28. Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that's why they can say they're so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!
Marjane Satrapi
#29. Here's a book about gnomes, undines, salamanders, elves, sylphs, fairies, but it, too, brings in the origins of Aryan civilization. The SS, apparently, are descended from the Seven Dwarfs.
Umberto Eco
#30. As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me.
Bertrand Russell
#31. The legalized liquor business is the tragedy of our civilization. Alcohol is the greatest and most blighting curse of our modern civilization. The liquor seller is simply and only a privileged malefactor - a criminal.
Abraham Lincoln
#32. Everything progresses in waves. The march of civilization, the progression of worlds, is in waves. All human activities likewise progress in waves - art, literature, science, religion.
Swami Vivekananda
#33. I do not think that the nerve of the modern child is any too good; how can one expect it, brought up as they are amongst all the horrors of civilization. The 'daring' child who used to be common enough, is seldom met nowadays.
Muriel Wace
#34. The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!
Robert E. Howard
#36. From everything that I'd read, End Timers were waiting for the collapse of civilization the way fans of the Twilight series awaited the trailer for Breaking Dawn.
Wendy McClure
#37. [T]he true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy personal psychological needs ... but lack the ideas or the means to contribute to the technical base.
E. O. Wilson
#38. I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilization.
Naguib Mahfouz
#39. To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.
Arthur Holly Compton
#40. What I question is the extent to which any of us truly knows what the facts really are. I mistrust every ideal cherished in western democratic civilization. The words that make others smile and nod in agreement cause me to recoil.
Boyd Rice
#41. He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity.
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
#42. There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
Roger Zelazny
#43. In China's thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today.
Zhou Shengxian
#44. Hate-on-the-highway is an institution occupying a high place in our modern civilization ... The godawful glares that drivers exchange as they pass each other, the mutual hatred between motorist and pedestrian, these manifestations seem to constitute the ultimate in righteous wrath.
H. Allen Smith
#45. Ancient Egypt was a Negro Civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt.
Cheikh Anta Diop
#46. Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.
Rebecca West
#47. There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball. These are the 3 most beautiful things this culture's ever created.
Gerald Early
#48. The United States, knowing no distinction of her own citizens on account of religion or nationality, naturally believes in a civilization the world over which will secure the same universal laws.
Ulysses S. Grant
#49. Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#50. The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society - we are on the eve of universal change.
Eugene V. Debs
#51. In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.
Paul Harris
#53. Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
Ada Louise Huxtable
#54. The spiritual sense of our place in nature ... can be traced to the origins of human civilization ... The last vestige of organized goddess worship was eliminated by Christianity.
Al Gore
#55. To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilization. The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war.
E. M. Forster
#56. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
Ezra Pound
#57. After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.
Dean Koontz
#58. In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#59. Dining is the privilege of civilization ... The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress.
Isabella Beeton
#60. I realize that something that was growing inside of me for some time ... has matured: and it is the hate of civilization, the absurd image of people moving like locos to the rhythm of that tremendous noise that seems to me like the hateful antithesis of peace.
Jon Lee Anderson
#61. It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it.
Arthur C. Clarke
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Fertility of the soil is the future of civilization.
Albert Howard
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Does the thoughtful man suppose that ... the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
George Santayana
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. It's the Law of God that gave the stability to Christian civilization.
Randall Terry
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.
Mark Twain
#82. The artist expresses his love through his works. That is civilization.
Bernard Pomerance
#83. 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
#84. Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.
Pierre Schaeffer
#85. 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
#86. Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.
Mao Zedong
#87. 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
#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. 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
#90. The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
Havelock Ellis
#91. The Filipino embraces civilization and lives and thrives in every clime, in contact with every people.
Jose Rizal
#92. Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
Brian W. Aldiss
#93. If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
Stanley Marion Garn
#94. A civilization that cannot see the sun and stars will be without religion. There
Liu Cixin
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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