Quotes on Civilization

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

Author: Brian Aldiss

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

Author: Thomas Aldrich

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

Author: Hervey Allen

That is why I come forward tonight without any political label, without any bias, but just simply as an Englishman to say to you: a crime is being committed against civilization.

Author: John Amery

The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.

Author: Aharon Appelfeld

It is only through books that we partake of the great harvest that is human civilization across the ages.

Author: Ibrahim Babangida

The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.

Author: Irving Babbitt

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

Author: Richard Bach

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

Author: Walter Bagehot

Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama.

Author: George Baker

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Author: John Barlow

You can't leave civilization behind entirely.

Author: Dirk Benedict

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding.

Author: Kathryn Bigelow

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

Author: Franz Boas

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

Author: Norman Borlaug

To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.

Author: James Breasted

But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.

Author: James Breasted

The last struggle for our rights, the battle for our civilization, is entirely with ourselves.

Author: William Brown

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

Author: William Bryan

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

Author: John Buchan

The condition of the tribes which occupy the country set apart for them in the West is highly prosperous, and encourages the hope of their early civilization. They have for the most part abandoned the hunter state and turned their attention to agricultural pursuits.

Author: Martin Buren

Iraq is no diversion. It is a place where civilization is taking a decisive stand against chaos and terror, we must not waver.

Author: George Bush

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

Author: Orson Card

It's very difficult to marry into another civilization.

Author: Leslie Caron

For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.

Author: Whittaker Chambers

Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting.

Author: Ralph Chaplin

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Author: Winston Churchill

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Author: Emile Cioran

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.

Author: Mason Cooley

Civilization and profit go hand in hand.

Author: Calvin Coolidge

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.

Author: Bill Cosby

We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about - farming replacing hunting.

Author: Jacques Cousteau

We must not try to force him to take civilization immediately in its complete form, but under just laws, guaranteeing to Indians equal civil laws, the Indian question, a source of such dishonor to our country and of shame to true patriots, will soon be a thing of the past.

Author: George Crook

I think governments are the cancer of civilization.

Author: Chuck D.

Morocco as it is is a very fine place spoiled by civilization.

Author: Richard Davis

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

Author: Christopher Dawson

This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other.

Author: Christopher Dawson

The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind.

Author: Benjamin Disraeli

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.

Author: Theodore Dreiser

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

Author: Ariel Durant

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

Author: Will Durant

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

Author: Will Durant

All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization.

Author: Gerald Durrell

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

Author: Havelock Ellis

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

Author: Henry Ellis

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Author: Ralph Emerson

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

Author: Friedrich Engels

Give me civilization. I don't want to be pampered.

Author: Jennifer Esposito

The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.

Author: Oriana Fallaci

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.

Author: Frantz Fanon

Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

Author: Fannie Farmer

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

Author: Richard Foreman

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.

Author: E. Forster

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

Author: John Fowles

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Author: Sigmund Freud

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

Author: Sigmund Freud

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

Author: Sigmund Freud

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Author: Sigmund Freud

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

Author: Sigmund Freud

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

Author: Mohandas Gandhi

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

Author: Stephen Gardiner

The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.

Author: Stephen Gardiner

Civilization is what makes you sick.

Author: Paul Gauguin

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

Author: Mikhail Gorbachev

Hold fast to the Bible. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization and to this we must look as our guide in the future.

Author: Ulysses Grant

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

Author: James Hall

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

Author: David Hare

In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.

Author: Paul Harris

Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization.

Author: Zahi Hawass

Without winners, there wouldn't even be any civilization.

Author: Woody Hayes

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Author: Shirley Hazzard

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.

Author: Robert Heinlein

I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise.

Author: Arthur Henderson

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

Author: Thor Heyerdahl

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.

Author: Edmund Hillary

The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization.

Author: Karen Horney

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

Author: Victor Hugo

From first to last the civilization of America has been bound up with its physical environment.

Author: Ellsworth Huntington

I would seriously question whether anybody is really foolish enough to really say what they mean. Sometimes I think that civilization as we know it would kind of break down if we all were completely honest.

Author: Elizabeth Hurley

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.

Author: Robert Ingersoll

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Author: Thomas Jefferson

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

Author: Tahar Jelloun

Tolerance is held to be a condition of mind which is encouraged by, and is necessary for, civilization.

Author: Arthur Keith

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

Author: Arthur Keith

Civilization, we shall find, like Universalism and Christianity, is anti evolutionary in its effects; it works against the laws and conditions which regulated the earlier stages of man's ascent.

Author: Arthur Keith

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

Author: Helen Keller

I believe with all my heart that civilization has produced nothing finer than a man or woman who thinks and practices true tolerance.

Author: Frank Knox

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.

Author: Karl Kraus

I would say practical progressive, which means that the Republican party or any political party has got to recognize the problems of a growing and complex industrial civilization. And I don't think the Republican party is really wide awake to that.

Author: Alf Landon

The sovereign state has in our times become a lethal danger to human civilization because technical developments enable it to employ an infinite number and variety of means of destruction.

Author: Christian Lange

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Author: Timothy Leary

China is a civilization pretending to be a nation.

Author: Michael Ledeen

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.

Author: Max Lerner

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

Author: Max Lerner

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.

Author: David Letterman

I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.

Author: Flora Lewis

When the toddler does something and there are consequences for his action civilization begins.

Author: Alicia Lieberman

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

Author: Charles Lindbergh

Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.

Author: Henry Lodge

Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.

Author: Henry Lodge

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

Author: James Lovelock

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Author: Joseph Maistre

Speech is civilization itself.

Author: Thomas Mann

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

Author: Karl Marx

Right now we're working on finishing up Pirates! for the Xbox, we're developing Civilization IV and we've got a couple other games in development that we'll tell you about soon.

Author: Sid Meier

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants.

Author: Robert Millikan

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

Author: Eugenio Montale

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

Author: John Motley

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.

Author: John O'Hara

If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.

Author: John Orr

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Author: George Orwell

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Author: George Orwell

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

Author: Camille Paglia

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

Author: Grace Paley

Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark.

Author: Theodore Parker

A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression.

Author: John Phillips

Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.

Author: Daniel Pipes

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

Author: Ezra Pound

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

Author: Lawrence Powell

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.

Author: Agnes Repplier

The slum is the measure of civilization.

Author: Jacob Riis

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

Author: Will Rogers

What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.

Author: Sonny Rollins

The line of least resistance in the progress of civilization is to make that theoretical postulate real by the continually increasing force of the world's public opinion.

Author: Elihu Root

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

Author: Alan Rudolph

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

Author: John Ruskin

A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.

Author: Charles Russell

A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

Author: Antoine Saint-Exupery

Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

Author: Pierre Schaeffer

By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else.

Author: Solomon Schechter

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Author: Joseph Schumpeter

The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented.

Author: Jack Schwartz

The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.

Author: William Simms

Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.

Author: Goldwin Smith

I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.

Author: Ian Smith

Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies.

Author: L. Smith

Civilization is hideously fragile and there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

Author: Carrie Snow

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Author: Thomas Sowell

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

Author: Thomas Sowell

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Author: Thomas Sowell

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.

Author: Herbert Spencer

It's just a show. It's not the end of Western Civilization. It's chewing gum.

Author: Jerry Springer

I ever will profess myself the greatest friend to those whose actions best correspond with their doctrine; which, I am sorry to say, is too seldom the case amongst those nations who pretend most to civilization.

Author: J. Stedman

It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward.

Author: Patrick Stewart

The city has become a serious menace to our civilization... It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.

Author: Josiah Strong

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

Author: Josiah Strong

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

Author: Maurice Strong

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

Author: Antonio Tabucchi

Justice has nothing to do with victor nations and vanquished nations, but must be a moral standard that all the world's peoples can agree to. To seek this and to achieve it - that is true civilization.

Author: Hideki Tojo