Civilization Quotes
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: Quotation and Originality, 1876
I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.Charles Lindbergh, Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper (letter to the editor)
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.Stanley Garn
The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.Sigmund Freud, (Attributed)
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.Hunter S. Thompson
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942)
One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.William Feathe
Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness".
Having a thirteen - Year - Old in the family is like having a general - Admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen - Agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.Max Lerne
It is so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.Ronald Knox
The family is the nucleus of civilization.William James Durant
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.Henry David Thoreau
If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.Eugene V. Debs
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life
It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.Henry Allen
Remember Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights - Then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.Endicott Peabody
I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two - Thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.Albert Einstein
Remember! Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights - Then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.Endicott Peabody
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.Ayn Rand
The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface.Aldous Huxley
The artist should be a seeing - Eye dog for a myopic civilization.Jacob Getlar Smith
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft - Minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.Martin Luther King Jr.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 14
The true law of the race is progress and development. Whatever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.Simms
The measuring rod of a civilization is the prosperity of the masses.Albert & Emily Vail, Transforming Light (pg 254)
Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.Timothy Leary
But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self - Righteousness - - Each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - - Each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.Herbert Butterfield
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.Georges Clemenceau
Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.Bishop Vincent
It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die... None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.Richard Milhous Nixon
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.Will Durant
I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government but civilization itself.Gerald R. Ford, Inaugural Address, 9 August 1974
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
Early civilizations complained about still earlier ones, much as we do about both.Author Unknown
Underlying the whole scheme of civilization is the confidence men have in each other, confidence in their integrity, confidence in their honesty, confidence in their future.Bourke Cockran
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.Oscar Wilde
