Quotes About The Civilization

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

George Santayana

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

Mao Zedong

#3. 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

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

Havelock Ellis

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

G.K. Chesterton

#9. 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

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

Norman Borlaug

#11. 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

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

Joseph Conrad

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

Stuart J. Russell

#14. 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

#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. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Orson F. Whitney

#21. Ladies and gentlemen, if some of the leading artists in a civilization see a man urinating in another man's mouth and see composition and lighting and do not see their civilization being pissed upon, we are in trouble.

Dennis Prager

#22. The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped, and contribute to the permanent prosperity and strength of the country far more than the most splendid victories of successful war.

Charles Babbage

#23. The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.

Joseph Campbell

#24. While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization,

Margaret Sanger

#25. On New York subways in the 1980s: Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.

Paul Goldberger

#26. Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. We must put question marks along many of our inherited legal dogmas, since they are dangerously out of line with social facts.

Jerome Frank

#27. 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

#28. The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.

Herbert Read

#29. I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Frantz Fanon

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?

Pierre Schaeffer

#33. We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us.

James Ramsey Ullman

#34. His insights have come to him through a crack in the veneer of civilization, which was also a crack in his own soul. He had the courage to look in this direction.

Susan Griffin

#35. Barbarian that I am, I had eaten all of it. It had tasted quite nice too. Still, I took note of this fact and resigned myself to throw away half of a perfectly good cheese if it was set in front of me. Such is the price of civilization.

Patrick Rothfuss

#36. 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

#37. Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves.

Mahatma Gandhi

#38. We may like to think of ourselves as civilized, but that civilization is in large part bestowed by material wealth. Without this stuff, we would quickly be confronted by the same basic struggle for survival that animals are faced with.

Mark Miodownik

#39. The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

Milton Friedman

#40. Civilization does everything for the mind and favors it entirely at the expense of the body.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#41. 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

#42. I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

Niall Ferguson

#43. The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.

Louis De Bernieres

#44. The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

Jose Saramago

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.

D.H. Lawrence

#48. But Chinese civilization has the overpowering beauty of the wholly other, and only the wholly other can inspire the deepest love and the profoundest desire to learn.

Joseph Needham

#49. When all material advancements utilized in spiritual need that is the real advancement of human civilization.

Bhakti Charu Swami

#50. 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

#51. If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.

Bill Nye

#52. 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

#53. Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.

Walter Isaacson

#54. Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions.

Sam Harris

#55. Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.

Don DeLillo

#56. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)

Bernard Malamud

#57. Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

John Burroughs

#58. On Mars, the crumbling remains of ancient civilizations may be found, mutely testifying to the one-time glory of a dying world.

P. E. Cleator

#59. Primary purposes of a mirror: (1) To help civilized men realize their imperfections, and, (2) To help the imperfect hide their imperfections.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#60. 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

#61. Civilization is a myth. That is the truth this world has taught us. We have not risen above our baser instincts... That is what always has and always will drive us.

Robert Kirkman

#62. Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.

William Jennings Bryan

#63. Civilizations fall because the people inside the Sanctuary throw open the gates.

Bill Whittle

#64. Cities are the crucible of civilization.

Geoffrey West

#65. Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from
indifference toward the unique values which created it.

Nicolas Gomez Davila

#66. Civilization has its roots in the soil.

Charles Kellogg

#67. Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded.

Mark Twain

#68. The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization ... Such war-making weapons should be developed - but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation

Thomas A. Edison

#69. The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.

Mark Twain

#70. War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

Omar N. Bradley

#71. If Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation [and] it would check his policy for a better international ethical code

Woodrow Wilson

#72. I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.

W. H. Auden

#73. Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

#74. Most of the scientists I know think civilization is teetering on the brink of a global disaster. They just don't know when it's going to hit. I don't have the answer to that either. I'm scared as hell.

Paul R. Ehrlich

#75. Muslims stand by their religion entirely. It is a sort of religious absolutism. While Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization. They confuse tolerance with relativism.

Bassam Tibi

#76. The consensus is clear. We need an immediate and determined shift to a clean, renewable economy. The continued mass burning of fossil fuels is inconsistent with a healthy, prosperous future for our civilization.

Al Gore

#77. For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.

Victor Hugo

#78. A call to embrace democracy is the worst insult to a society that is still alien to civilisation. It is like being asked to dance to the tune of mob justice.

Newton Gatambia

#79. Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic world of Mel Gibson's Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armed thugs. They were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanity and civilization.

Mark Bowden

#80. 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

#81. The great question is, can war be outlawed from the world? If so, it would mark the greatest advance in civilization since the Sermon on the Mount.

Douglas MacArthur

#82. Civilization itself is housed in the human being.

Nayantara Sahgal

#83. It is a strange life up here on the mountain side, but I like it, and never yearn after civilization.

Isabella L. Bird

#84. If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.

Clive James

#85. And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.

Richard Tarnas

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

Thomas Carlyle

#87. Throughout the Arab and Islamic world the feeling is that we are now in top gear for a war of civilizations, a clash of civilizations. Support for the United States is very low and there are no voices within the Muslim world, except for a very few.

Husain Haqqani

#88. Sweatpants painted to look like denim are the end of civilization. It drives me mental.

Annabel Tollman

#89. But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists.

Roger Scruton

#90. The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.

Lionel Shriver

#91. 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

#92. Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to an attack on the tribal chieftain cannot be regarded as wanting in cultivated feeling.

Robertson Davies

#93. Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life.

Anthony Daniels

#94. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#95. Every murder strikes at the heart of civilization; it is an attack on all mankind.

Rae Foley

#96. Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

Rebecca West

#97. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!

Ursula K. Le Guin

#98. If civilization ever achieves a higher standard of what constitutes normality, it will have been the neurotic who led the way.

Nancy Hale

#99. My only hope is that every other alien civilization isn't doing exactly what we are doing because then everybody would be listening, nobody would be receiving, and we would collectively conclude that there is no other intelligent life in the universe.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#100. Egypt.mother of civilization, dreaming herself through the centuries. Dreaming us all, her children: those who stay and work for her and complain of her, and those who leave and yearn for her and blame her with bitterness for driving them away.

Ahdaf Soueif