Civilization Quotes

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

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

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

Individual commitment to a group effort - That is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Vince Lombardi

The artist should be a seeing - Eye dog for a myopic civilization.

Jacob Getlar Smith

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.

Arnold Toynbee

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Sigmund Freud, (Attributed)

The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.

Andre Malraux

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

Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles... respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law... or, in a word justice.

Max Nordau

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.

Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness".

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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

Sigmund Freud

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

Mark Twain

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942)

Civilization is a transient sickness.

Robinson Jeffers

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

Will Durant

Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.

Jack Kerouac

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)

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

Ambrose Bierce

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Cyril Connolly

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

Civilization is a slow process of adopting the ideas of minorities.

Anonymous

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

Robert Ingersoll

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

William Feathe

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara Tuchman

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Mark Twain

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Oscar Wilde

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

Brian Aldiss

We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge.

George Will

The measuring rod of a civilization is the prosperity of the masses.

Albert & Emily Vail, Transforming Light (pg 254)

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

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

Charles Lindbergh