Civilization Quotes

Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.

Bishop Vincent

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.

Ignazio Silone

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

Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.

Jean Francois Revel

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

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Arnold Toynbee

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Agnes Repplie

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

Herbert Spence

What a time! What a civilization!

Cicero

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

Will Durant

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

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.

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

Vince Lombardi

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 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

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

Martin Luther King Jr.

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

Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness".

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

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

Sigmund Freud, (Attributed)

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

Brian Aldiss

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

Stanley Garn

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.

Amos Bronson Alcott, Table Talk (1877)

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Arnold Toynbee

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

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

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

Simms

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

Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

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 exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

Will Durant

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

Charles Lindbergh

Civilization is very much an immature and ongoing experiment, the success of which is by no means yet proven.

Colin Turnbull, anthropologist, The Human Cycle

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing song.

Will Durant

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Mark Twain

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

Walter Bagehot