History Civilization Quotes

#1. Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything.

Tom Turner

#2. He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work.

Kenneth W. Harl

#3. The biggest farce of man's history has been the argument that wars are fought to save civilization.

Charles E. McKenzie

#4. I know something about the civilization of China, with my background, obviously, and I think I know something about American history. But that's about all. And I've traveled all over the world, and for a long time I didn't know very much about it, really.

I.M. Pei

#5. Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.

Howard Zinn

#6. 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

#7. Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

Grover Cleveland

#8. So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

Steven Pinker

#9. I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#10. The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.

John Keegan

#11. Of course, all students should learn African history, as they should learn the history of other continents and major civilizations. But this history should be taught accurately and based on the best scholarship, not ideology or politics.

Diane Ravitch

#12. It is a disturbing fact that Western civilization, which claims to have achieved the highest standard of health in history, finds itself compelled to spend ever-increasing sums for the control of disease.

Rene Dubos

#13. 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

#14. If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#15. But even a victory of planning will not mean the end of history. Atrocious wars among the candidates for the supreme office will break out. Totalitarianism may wipe out civilization, even the whole of the human race. Then, of course, history will have come to its end too.

Ludwig Von Mises

#16. There's never been a civilization, ever in history, that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity and traditional marriage, traditional child rearing, and has survived.

Pat Roberts

#17. And Christian compassion is another factor that made the West the best civilization in history. Let us examine it next.

Vishal Mangalwadi

#18. 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

#19. Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch to be handed from race to race from age to age.

Kelly Miller

#20. To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.

Derrick Jensen

#21. We have seen and do see the type of evil that is within human civilization, and the Holocaust took place in European history during an advanced state of technology and form of civilization, only to become an event in that history that questioned what civilization actually means.

Laszlo Nemes

#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. History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?

Christian Lous Lange

#24. More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.

David Suzuki

#25. We're addicted to this concept of civilization - we can't imagine living outside of it because we've had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.

Serj Tankian

#26. Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true.

Carl Sagan

#27. 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

#28. I feel that I'm in a very interesting position, where I'm standing back to look at this change, at this moment in history of human beings. If the end of the civilization comes before the end of my life, that's lucky! I want to witness how this big story of humans ends.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

#29. We live in the midst of the greatest scientific civilization in the history of the world. But the greatest wisdom walking our streets is not in any laboratory scientist, but the wisdom of Jesus Christ.

Norman Vincent Peale

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#31. Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

James A. Michener

#32. The battlefields where the dice of world history have been thrown can never be ordinary fields again and no god from a vanished civilization is so dead that he does not live on in his ruined temple.

Goran Schildt

#33. Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.

Mark Kurlansky

#34. Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.

Ralph Adams Cram

#35. The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.

Joseph Campbell

#36. Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism.

Jacques Ellul

#37. Maybe they didn't want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away all that's left is some story in a history class.

Scott Westerfeld

#38. Here's a history of the world: Girl meets boy. Girl fucks boy. Girl gets scared and skips out on boy. Boy builds civilization to lure girl back.

Leah Raeder

#39. It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization.

Carl Sagan

#40. The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

Madame De Stael

#41. For all of higher civilization's recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family.

Dennis Prager

#42. I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

Dalai Lama

#43. We tried to make a beautiful world here, the voices mumble. There were those who saw the end of civilization as an opportunity to start over, to undo the errors of history
to relive mankind's awkward adolescence with all the wisdom of our modern age. But everything was happening so fast.

Isaac Marion

#44. Culture is the best society has to offer...How can we pass on civilization to those who do not value civilization. (Terrence Rattigan)

Beth Fine

#45. I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history

Francis George

#46. Most people, and certainly all members of Western civilization, are [...] born into a world which differs radically from that of their ancestors, with the result that most of human history is a closed book to them.

Patricia Crone

#47. Civilization is a fiction which becomes a fact only as long as everyone can believe in it. It is the cynic, rather than the rebel, who pulls down the whole flimsy structure periodically throughout history.

Helen McCloy

#48. In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

Abdus Salam

#49. The family is the engine that drives civilization. Throughout history, those cultures that have failed to found their rules and attitudes of society on the central importance of the family unit have decayed and disintegrated.

Jeremiah Denton

#50. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which the worst by far is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much?

Bernard DeVoto

#51. America is the only civilization in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization

Georges Clemenceau

#52. Since the dawn of time, traditional marriage - the union between one man and one woman - has been the building block of civilization, and at no point in our nation's history has that foundation been under more severe attack than now.

Jim DeMint

#53. When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.

Daniel Suarez

#54. There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.

Robert M. T. Hunter

#55. I think ... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

Tom Stoppard

#56. The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

Walter Bagehot

#57. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

Barbara Tuchman

#58. Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

Arnold J. Toynbee

#59. We are the most informed people in the history of civilization - and yet the most confused. Though our heads are crammed with knowledge, our hearts are empty.

Billy Graham

#60. I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.

Joseph Rotblat

#61. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

#62. It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat

Jeffrey Burton Russell

#63. Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.

William James

#64. The planetary phase of history has begun, but the future shape of global society remains profoundly uncertain. Though perhaps improbable, a shift toward a planetary civilization of enriched lives, human solidarity, and environmental sustainability is still possible.

Paul Raskin

#65. Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.

Abdelaziz Bouteflika

#66. If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.

Johan Huizinga

#67. Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.

Christopher Dawson

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

Orson F. Whitney

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

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

Mao Zedong

#73. 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. 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

#75. 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

#76. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

Joe Haldeman

#77. America's civilization perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.

Walter A. McDougall

#78. If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization

Ludwig Von Mises

#79. Some Westerners [ ... ] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.

Samuel P. Huntington

#80. There are ruins all over the world, testaments of the atrocities, and burial chambers of the lost souls. But the facts are always misinterpreted. History is inaccurate.

Jeyn Roberts

#81. Do you remember what happened to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? A whole civilization destroyed by greedy, righteous bigots. History will never forgive Cortez.

Ray Bradbury

#82. It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.

James Henry Breasted

#83. The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

William Barrett

#84. All through history, a nation or a civilization's enduring glory is articulated by its mega constructions - the pyramids, the lofty cathedrals of the Christian world.

F. Sionil Jose

#85. Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

Samuel P. Huntington

#86. 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

#87. Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Will Durant

#88. A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#89. The history of America is the history of a genocide that didn't end yet, the genocide of American civilizations.

Luiz Bolognesi

#90. They will wake up one morning and realize their civilization has been pulled out from under them, inch by inch, dollar by dollar, just as ours was. They will know what it is to have been asleep for the most important century of their history.

G. Willow Wilson

#91. The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it aloneits ideologies and inventionswhich eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.

Susan Sontag

#92. Every bride and groom in the history of civilization has gained weight after their wedding day. It is only a matter of time until archaeologists unearth a married caveman who's wearing a pair of old tux pants that were so tight he couldn't get the zipper closed.

Peter Scott

#93. War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.

Will Durant

#94. The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#95. Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.

Jared Diamond

#96. The contribution of Islam to history and modern civilization is the product of the efforts of peoples of many races and tongues which came to accept its way of life.

Aly Khan

#97. Anybody who knows something about the history of the human race knows that there is no civilization which has condoned homosexual marriage widely and openly that has long survived.

Todd Akin

#98. Who would have predicted a century ago that the richest civilizations in history would be made up of polluted tracts of suburban development dominated by the private automobile, shopping malls, and a throwaway economy? Surely, this is not the ultimate fulfillment of our destiny.

Alan Thein Durning

#99. Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.

Erich Fromm

#100. The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

Catharine Beecher