Civilization Quotes

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

Vine Deloria

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

Jean Francois Revel

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

William James Durant

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

Sigmund Freud

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

Arnold Toynbee

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

Will Durant

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 a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Mark Twain

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

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

Bishop Vincent

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

What a time! What a civilization!

Cicero

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

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

Sigmund Freud, (Attributed)

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

Martin Luther King Jr.

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life

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

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

Agnes Repplie

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

Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness".

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

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two - Thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.

Albert Einstein

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

Mikhail Gorbachev, June 8, 1990

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

Civilization has been thrust upon me... and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.

Luther Standing Bea

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

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 transient sickness.

Robinson Jeffers

Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.

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 slow process of adopting the ideas of minorities.

Anonymous

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

Jane Addams, Speech, Honolulu (1933)

Simplicity is the peak of civilization.

Jessie Sampte

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

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Arnold Toynbee

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

Barbara Tuchman

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