Civilization Quotes

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

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

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

David Browe

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

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

Civilization is a transient sickness.

Robinson Jeffers

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

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 end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

Will Durant

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.

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

Will Durant

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

Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness".

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life

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

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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 basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.

Andre Malraux

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

Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.

Alvin Toffle

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.

Amos Bronson Alcott, Table Talk (1877)

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

Herbert Spence

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

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

Erma Bombeck

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

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

Mark Twain

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

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

Martin Luther King Jr.

Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.

Vine Deloria

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

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

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

Sigmund Freud