Civilization Quotes

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

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

Herbert Spence

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

Robert Ingersoll

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.

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

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 degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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

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

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 is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Oscar Wilde

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

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

Jacob Getlar Smith

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

David Browe

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

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.

Amos Bronson Alcott, Table Talk (1877)

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

Will Durant

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

Vince Lombardi

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

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

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

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

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

It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.

Henry Allen

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Timothy Leary

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

Walter Bagehot

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

Erma Bombeck

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.

Henry Kissinge

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

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

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

Arnold Toynbee

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

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