Civilization Quotes

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have b...

Barbarians are all alike... sit up half the night to discuss anything a Roman says.

There is such a thing as too much couth.

We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It's not a surprise that there are shocking ineq...

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source ...

The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with w...

Once, headed uptown on the 9 train, I noticed a sign posted by the Metropolitan Transit Authority ad...

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civil...

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they...

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they...

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of ins...

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they...

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine sin...

One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority...

a single generation enamoured of foreign ways is almost enough in history to risk the whole continui...

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?

Throughout human history, countries rise and fall. But not America--we continue to rise and rise, li...

Desire for goodness, Mister Reese, leads to earnestness. Earnestness in turn leads to sanctimonious ...

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other'...

War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said. "Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?""Absol—well, o...

I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly.He appeared to consi...

The three great elements of modern civilization Gunpowder Printing and the Protestant Religion.

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

If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domesticat...

It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the bu...

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in ...

I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks w...

This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—wo...

Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that som...

If you would civilize a man begin with his grandmother.

The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make ...

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today...

We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.

The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the p...

Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity an...

Let us humour if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one.

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to....

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels a...

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exci...

I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it ne...

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization tea...

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance ...

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds hi...

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and un...

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. ...

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the...

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers t...

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages.

People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection an...

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on th...

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiorit...

Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-c...

There has never been but one question in all civilization-how to keep a few men from saying to many ...

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relati...

What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through ...

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This ...

It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it...

I have a feeling that we've seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now we're look...

The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mex...

It was not exasperation.... It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endo...

Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit...

The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to...

A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what ma...

A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth beauty adventure art and pea...

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

What, after all, was the point of civilization if not the well-being of citizens?

You are so civilized. So polite. So brave coming here alone when you know no one here would dare to ...

No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle en...

Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:1) They respect human beings as ind...

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

After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.

Only by the aid of language does reason bring about its most important achievements, namely the harm...

Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them...

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the ...

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each y...

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we sa...

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying it

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.", September 14, 1958)

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.

Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs,...

[L]uxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that ...