Civilization Quotes
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.Barbara Tuchman
The family is the nucleus of civilization.William James Durant
The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.Robert Ingersoll
Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.Amos Bronson Alcott, Table Talk (1877)
The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.Sigmund Freud, (Attributed)
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
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)
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
It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.Henry Allen
When vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead, it is time to pause and wonder.David Browe
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
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
Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.Charles Lindbergh
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.Oscar Wilde
When humor goes, there goes civilization.Erma Bombeck
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 end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.Ralph Waldo Emerson
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.Oliver Wendell Holmes
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
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
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.Mark Twain
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942)
Civilization has been thrust upon me... and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.Luther Standing Bea
Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.Jack Kerouac
The measuring rod of a civilization is the prosperity of the masses.Albert & Emily Vail, Transforming Light (pg 254)
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.Henry Kissinge
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
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".
Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.Vine Deloria
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
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.Sigmund Freud
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
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 distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.Brian Aldiss
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
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life
