Civilization Quotes

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

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Arnold Toynbee

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

Charles Lindbergh

It is the first step of wisdom to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the society in which they occur.

George Whitehead

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

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

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 family is the nucleus of civilization.

William James Durant

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Jacob Getlar Smith

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

On Western civilization I think it would be a good idea.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

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

Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people - A black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Civilization is a transient sickness.

Robinson Jeffers

Civilization has been thrust upon me... and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.

Luther Standing Bea

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

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

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

Vince Lombardi

If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.

Stanley Garn

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

Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness".

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

When vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead, it is time to pause and wonder.

David Browe

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 F. Will

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft - Minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.

Martin Luther King Jr.

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

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Mark Twain

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Georges Clemenceau

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

Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.

Vine Deloria

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

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.

Jane Addams, Speech, Honolulu (1933)

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

Brian Aldiss

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

Mark Twain

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