Top 100 Human Civilization Quotes
#1. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.
Joe Haldeman
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#8. There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
Edward Abbey
#9. 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
#10. Everything we have of value as human beings - as a civilization - is the result of our intelligence.
Stuart J. Russell
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Man's Chief purpose ... is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.
Lewis Mumford
#20. In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.
Yukichi Fukuzawa
#21. Where the human need for order meets
the human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.
Ian McEwan
#22. Scientology is the science of knowing how to know answers. It is a wisdom in the tradition of ten thousand years of search in Asia and Western civilization. It is the Science of Human Affairs which treats the livingness and beingness of Man and demonstrates to him a pathway to greater freedom.
L. Ron Hubbard
#23. Civil movements and riots are as old as human civilization. Long before Twitter was created, mobilization of the discontented was mouth-to-mouth, or even by 'smoke signals' to gather the uprising against established political power.
Eduardo Paes
#24. Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization.
Al Gore
#25. 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
#26. Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.
Jonathan Sacks
#27. If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#28. Civilization is human rights, it is the path of setting man free from men, phobia, to survive it, we must cultivate the science of human relationships.
Audrey Hepburn
#29. 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
#30. Poverty is a national waste as well as individual waste. We are all diminished when any of us are denied proper education. The nation is the poorer - a poorer economy, a poorer civilization, because of this human and national waste.
Gough Whitlam
#31. If we can change our priorities, achieve balance and understanding in our roles as human beings in a complex world, the coming era can well be that of a richer civilization, not its end.
Sigurd F. Olson
#32. Every single human civilization has failed over time, and my belief is that it's due to a lack of rational empathy, of understanding that if you don't have equality in your society, the conflicts you breed (whether internally or externally) will eventually cause its collapse.
Chris Kluwe
#33. 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
#34. When all material advancements utilized in spiritual need that is the real advancement of human civilization.
Bhakti Charu Swami
#35. I pray God that we shall never use our physical prowess to oppress the human race, but we will use our strength, physically, morally and otherwise to preserve humanity and civilization.
Marcus Garvey
#36. Civilization no longer needs to open up wilderness; it needs wilderness to help open up the still largely unexplored human mind.
David Wallace
#37. A UNITED civilization is possible only when human relations are balanced in all transactions which have to do with the distribution of the values of life which all men persistently and constantly seek.
Walter Russell
#38. At the core of 'Star Trek' is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.
George Takei
#39. 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
#40. What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.
Jack Vance
#41. The highest monuments of human civilization accept its ironies and lend their eternity to its mischievous pranks.
Victor Hugo
#42. Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural ... A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.
Alfred North Whitehead
#43. Human civilization has always been preoccupied with erecting walls.
Marcello Di Cintio
#44. A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence ... It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages.
Carl Sagan
#45. When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning - human meaning, that is - is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
#46. When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.
Daniel Suarez
#47. 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. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
Sigmund Freud
#48. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.
Theodore Dreiser
#49. Our carbon emissions have to eventually go to zero. We have to. Otherwise we're never going to have a stable climate and that's what our goal is for human civilization to thrive, a stable climate. We don't want one that's hotter, we don't want one that's colder, we want one that's stable.
Katharine Hayhoe
#51. A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.
Matthew Woodring Stover
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Insects have their own point of view about civilization a man thinks he amounts to a great deal but to a flea or a mosquito a human being is merely something good to eat.
Don Marquis
#55. There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation of a world government.
Albert Einstein
#56. Dictatorships, wars, and cruelty drive whole countries to madness. My theory is that the human species was crazy from the very first and that civilization and culture are only enhancing man's insanity.
A Tale of Two Sisters
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#57. It has been said that civilization is the process of freeing human beings from each other, and that is true. But it takes people to free each other, because people cannot be freed from each other except by each other. The irony of this cannot be overstated.
Robert Peate
#58. AA 241:87 - I would argue that masturbation is the human animal's most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization.
Ernest Cline
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.
D.H. Lawrence
#62. Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.
Samuel P. Huntington
#63. Human civilization was annihilated in three hours, before even one alien bothered to set foot on the ground.
Chris J. Randolph
#64. That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilization
Thomas Huxley
#65. Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
Alexander Pushkin
#66. Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization - is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it?
Peter Abrahams
#67. 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
#68. Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related.
Marianne Williamson
#69. However life started, once established, it persisted for over 3.5 billion years and evolved from microbial slime to the sophistication of human civilization.
David C. Catling
#70. In all human societies, health and education have an intrinsic value: the ability to enjoy years of good health, like the ability to acquire knowledge and culture, is one of the fundamental purposes of civilization.
Thomas Piketty
#71. Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact
Jacques Ellul
#72. 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
#73. In another age we mastered the physical ocean, thereby creating universal civilization; now we will master the psychological ocean, emotion, mother human nature, thereby creating intellectual civilization.
Fernando Pessoa
#74. For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized
Rod Serling
#76. Indeed it is the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical and self-correcting - not only in producing wealth but over the whole range of human activities - that constitutes its most decisive superiority over any of its rivals.
Paul Johnson
#77. Humankind is able to create new conditions, a new reality. We are not fated to swim forever among the realities that are here now ... Everything that is worthwhile in human civilization has not only originated from but has been inspired by dreams, by imagination.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#78. It is only through books that we partake of the great harvest that is human civilization across the ages.
Ibrahim Babangida
#79. Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.
Richard Francis Burton
#80. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
Julian Assange
#81. 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
#82. The child that was human civilization had opened the door to her home and glanced outside. The endless night terrified her so much that she shuddered against the expansive and profound darkness, and shut the door firmly.
Liu Cixin
#83. It is necessary to name the enemy of human civilization, and this enemy is international terrorism associated with religious fundamentalism and religious intolerance.
Milos Zeman
#84. [He was disgusted] at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster.
Pat Frank
#85. Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#86. More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.
David Suzuki
#87. Old Age homes are civilization's dumpsites for human beings who it cannot exploit further.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#88. We need to shift from an economic to a humanitarian organizing principle for human civilization. And women, en masse, should be saying so.
Marianne Williamson
#89. Human is human," said Issib. "But civilized - that's the gift of the Oversoul. Civilization without self-destruction.
Orson Scott Card
#90. 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
#91. If human civilization is going to invade the waters of the earth, then let it be first of all to carry a message of respect.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
#92. Yes, the civilization of love is possible; it is not a utopia. But it is only possible by a constant and ready reference to the "Father from whom all fatherhood and motherhood on earth is named," from whom every human family comes.
Pope John Paul II
#93. War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.
C.S. Lewis
#94. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it when fade away.
W.G. Sebald
#95. That human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too.
David Mitchell
#96. The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.
Osama Bin Laden
#97. It is an awesome thing to comprehend the magnitude of the fact that what a human being dreams and imagines can be realized. The power of that truth needs to be directed toward our creation of a future that is worthy of true human value and the world civilization.
Vanna Bonta
#98. We don't understand the power of nature and the world because we don't live with it. Our environment is designed to sustain us. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo called civilization.
Laurence Gonzales
#99. If and when our civilization comes to ruin, the destructive agent will be Science; man's knowledge of science, applied to warfare, meaning slaughter not only of human bodies, but of human institutions, of all we have created through the centuries.
Cicely Hamilton
#100. The human beings who appear in the data, survivors or not, are grouped under one machine designated classification:
Hero.
These damn machines knew us and loved us, even while they were tearing our civilization to shreds.
Daniel H. Wilson
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