Civilization Quotes

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Arnold Toynbee

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)

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Mark Twain

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

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

Robert Ingersoll

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

John Burroughs

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

Jane Addams, Speech, Honolulu (1933)

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Agnes Repplie

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

Henry Allen

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 is a slow process of adopting the ideas of minorities.

Anonymous

One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.

Barry Lopez

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

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

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

Charles Lindbergh

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

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, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 14

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

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

Timothy Leary

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

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

Brian Aldiss

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

Sigmund Freud, (Attributed)

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

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Early civilizations complained about still earlier ones, much as we do about both.

Author Unknown

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

Albert & Emily Vail, Transforming Light (pg 254)

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

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

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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

Bishop Vincent

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

Mikhail Gorbachev, June 8, 1990

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

Georges Clemenceau

Simplicity is the peak of civilization.

Jessie Sampte

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

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

Arnold Toynbee

What a time! What a civilization!

Cicero

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

Barbara Tuchman