Modern Civilization Quotes

#1. 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

#2. One cannot deny that in former times man's life had been one of toil and hardship. It is correct to say, therefore, that modern civilization and the progress of science have greatly improved man's life and have brought comfort and ease in their trail.

Haile Selassie

#3. The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied.

Bertrand Russell

#4. Our modern civilization returns exceedingly little of what it borrows. -Martin Renner

Michael Pollan

#5. [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

#6. We Christians must simplify our lives or lose untold treasures on earth and in eternity. Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. The need for solitude and quietness was never greater than it is today.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#7. Responsibility has become the fundamental imperative in modern civilization, and it should be an unavoidable criterion to assess and evaluate human actions, including, in a special way, development activities.

Hans Jonas

#8. The British Government in India constitutes a struggle between modern civilization, which is the Kingdom of Satan, and the ancient civilization, which is the Kingdom of God.

Mahatma Gandhi

#9. To me, the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event in modern civilization.

Robert Shapiro

#10. A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.

Vaclav Smil

#11. Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin.

Mahatma Gandhi

#12. If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go into the advertising business in preference to almost any other. The general raising of the standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half ce

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#13. The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.

Pope Pius IX

#14. When an Italian marries a Greek, you get the union of two lots of people who believe themselves to be the creators of modern civilization

Joe Novella

#15. 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

#16. Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus.

Thomas Mellon

#17. Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

George Bernard Shaw

#18. Everything in modern civilization is based on this concept of time which is not really valid.

Jose Arguelles

#19. If the teachings of the Protestants in Europe gave birth to the Protestant ethics and the modern civilization, it becomes alarming that most of our charismatic teachings today mainly concentrate on individual aggrandizement

Sunday Adelaja

#20. While the comforts of modern civilization and technological success or economic success seem at the moment quite fulfilling, I can assure you that all of these things are transitory and will fall away.

Frederick Lenz

#21. The interesting thing is the field is so big - it's enormous. One thing a modern civilization needs is energy.

Charlie Munger

#22. We must open our eyes and see that modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with thelives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and out of it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#23. How much modern civilization has lost, I think, when they lost the awareness of the billions of stars overhead.

Christopher Pike

#24. Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.

P. J. O'Rourke

#25. 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

#26. The currents of modern civilization had somehow passed it by, and as he returned to it now, fresh from the sides of England and France, Sergei Semenov saw only familiar signs of backwardness and decay.

Orlando Figes

#27. Modern civilization has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise.

Mahatma Gandhi

#28. A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#29. 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

#30. Modern civilization is a product of an energy binge. Binges often end in hangovers.

Alfred W. Crosby

#31. 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

#32. I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we're here. And we're trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization.

Serj Tankian

#33. Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words.

G.I. Gurdjieff

#34. Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization

Thomas Huxley

#35. Present-Day Wickedness, Apostasy and Modern Civilization Cannot Prevent Revival.

John R. Rice

#36. Modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#37. I believe in corporations. They are indispensable instruments of our modern civilization. But I believe they should be so regulated that they shall act for the interests of the community as a whole.

Theodore Roosevelt

#38. If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.

Marcus Garvey

#39. Modern civilization has no understanding of sacred matters. Everything is backwards.

Thomas Yellowtail

#40. We do not see faith, hope, and charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout supports of a nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#41. The fact remains that, if the supply of energy failed, modern civilization would come to an end as abruptly as does the music of an organ deprived of wind.

Frederick Soddy

#42. The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Thomas Carlyle

#43. I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization - you can't just swallow it whole.

Frank Zappa

#44. 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

#45. What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man's liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted

Lin Yutang

#46. With engaging prose, Engelman takes readers on a delightful journey?that both entertains and educates ? of modern civilization and women's central role to ensuring the economic and social well-being of their families, communities, nations and the global community.

Geeta Rao Gupta

#47. No greater tragedy exists in modern civilization than the aged, worn-out worker who after a life of ceaseless effort and useful productivity must look forward for his declining years to a poorhouse. A modern social consciousness demands a more humane and efficient arrangement.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#48. The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don't know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#49. Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.

William Morris

#50. One could almost phrase the motto of our modern civilization thus: Science is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

#51. The materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

Alan Watts

#52. The disease of mutual distrust among nations is the bane of modern civilization.

Franz Boas

#53. Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?

Jared Diamond

#54. The British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment - whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or some combination of all three - to the world's less fortunate cultures and races.

Scott Anderson

#55. There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.

Bryant McGill

#56. Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

#57. 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

#58. I know this, and I know it from actual experience in the Orient, that the progress of modern Christian civilization has largely depended on the earnest hard work of the Christian missions of every denomination.

William Howard Taft

#59. Modern India is a product of Hindu tradition, the religion of Islam, and Western civilization.

Gurcharan Das

#60. 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

#61. Of course I realized that the Protestants denominations of the world have grown and matured over the years, but maybe we should not throw away the gains of the old Protestants that brought us to our modern day civilization.

Sunday Adelaja

#62. It was the transmutation of the classical liberal intellectual foundation by Christianity that gave modern Europe its impetus and that pushed European accomplishment so far ahead of all other cultures and civilizations around the world.

Charles A. Murray

#63. By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.

Lewis Mumford

#64. 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

#65. Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.

Arthur Koestler

#66. 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

#67. Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

John Buchan

#68. I should like to say that I am as proud of my Chinese heritage and background as I am devoted to modern science, a part of human civilization of Western origin, to which I have dedicated and I shall continue to dedicate my work.

Chen-Ning Yang

#69. A modern and humane civilization must control conception or sink into barbaric cruelty to individuals.

Marie Stopes

#70. Believers fight each other over the correct interpretation and even kill members of their own faiths in battles over doctrine. Civilization has been immensely retarded by such arcane interfaith quarrels and could now be destroyed by their modern versions.

Christopher Hitchens

#71. Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.

Karen Armstrong

#72. When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.

Louis Sullivan

#73. The more one observes, the more clearly does he see that it is in the soil of pure science that are found the origins of all our modern industry and commerce. In fact,our civilization is wholly built upon our scientific discoveries.

Herbert Hoover

#74. It is an altogether wrong idea that the modern product of civilization is less susceptible to love. I sometimes think it is the other way.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

#75. The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#76. The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.

James C. Scott

#77. The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.

Robert A. Nisbet

#78. 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

#79. I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.

E.L. Doctorow

#80. Despite 2000 years of evolution in modern times, we have still not managed to develop the intelligence to create a society that knows what love is. Our society is still not a civilization, it is still primitive and barbaric.

Swami Dhyan Giten

#81. To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.

George Edward Woodberry

#82. 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

#83. Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.

Altiero Spinelli

#84. ...any attempt to define the characteristics of modern society is akin to defining the color of a chameleon.

Yuval Noah Harari

#85. Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society.

Samuel P. Huntington

#86. There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.

Will Durant

#87. Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.

Arnold J. Toynbee

#88. We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so.

Thor Heyerdahl

#89. The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn ... tired of common sense and civilization.

F.L. Lucas

#90. Zionism has gained my full sympathy and I appreciate
it much higher than what is called nationalism in modern
France. It is a progressive movement, a reawakening,
of which I expect a lot for the entire civilization.

Tomas Garrigue Masaryk

#91. By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization simply fail to exist in the first place.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#92. for it is this modern Occidental civilization which, since about the middle of the thirteenth century, has been - quite literally - the only innovating civilization in the world.

Joseph Campbell

#93. 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

#94. Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.

G.K. Chesterton

#95. The time is probably not far distant when music will stand revealed perchance as the mightiest of the arts, and certainly as the one art peculiarly representative of our modern world, with its intense life, complex civilization, and feverish self-consciousness.

Hugh Reginald Haweis

#96. Resort to science has rendered modern war so destructive of life and property that it presents a new problem to mankind, such, that unless our civilization shall find some means of making an end to war, war will make an end to our civilization.

John Hessin Clarke

#97. There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.

Hans Hofmann

#98. Modern Existentialism ... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

William Barrett