Civilization Quotes

George whitehead - it is the first step of wisdom to recognize that...
The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops? no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude
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.
The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
Sigmund Freud, (Attributed)
Andre malraux - the basic problem is that our civilization, which...
I think there are only three things America will be known for 2, 000 years from now when they study this civilization the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.
Gerald Early
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
When humor goes, there goes civilization.
Erma Bombeck
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
Arnold Toynbee
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)
Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.
Amos Bronson Alcott, Table Talk (1877)
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.
G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942)
The measuring rod of a civilization is the prosperity of the masses.
Albert & Emily Vail, Transforming Light (pg 254)
Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.
Herbert Spence
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
Brian Aldiss
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft - Minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
Will Durant
When vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead, it is time to pause and wonder.
David Browe
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
John Burroughs
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.
Henry Kissinge
It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.
Henry Allen
Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.
Charles Lindbergh
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
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 family is the nucleus of civilization.
William James Durant
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Oscar Wilde
Civilization has been thrust upon me... and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.
Luther Standing Bea
Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
Timothy Leary
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
Mark Twain
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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
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
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
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)
Early civilizations complained about still earlier ones, much as we do about both.
Author Unknown
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Will Durant
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara Tuchman
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