Civilization Quotes

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, "This is mine,"...

I know that [civilized men] do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in t...

There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. ...

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. ...

It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of slee...

By the time of the arrival of Islam in the early seventeenth century CE, what we now call the Middle...

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 m...

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our m...

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

Civilization must be preserved,' says he.'Civilization's doing fine,' I said. 'We just don't happen ...

The first Abenaki word I ever learned was Bitawbagok – the word they use for Lake Champlain. It mea...

The hardest part about being back in the human world was relearning emotion. Everything a wolf does ...

Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted r...

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.

Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to not...

The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is c...

And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, ...

It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of...

And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his 'Every Chang...

Civilizations die from philosophical calm irony and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they...

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that d...

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death...

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from...

I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to viole...

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I...

In the early twelfth century century the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation. Sh...

Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imaginat...

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a ki...

Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which ancient ...

But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, u...

In God's scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen...

Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They ar...

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value...

The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle.

If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.

And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civiliz...

(When asked what he thought of Western civilization): 'I think it would be a good idea.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be ...

In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors ...

What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three million times is civilization.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less sava...

And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle. "Nothing at all. You gain nothing; y...

The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man's revenge upon the strong; it's jus...

But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all...

Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century a...

The capitalists are the brains of civilization, because they supply the entire fabric of which all e...

By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured t...

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn...

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the st...

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies fromindifference toward ...

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the surviva...

Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate fo...

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not lov...

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being th...

All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the soci...

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in ...

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people...

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civili...

I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only by shutting on...

Why wasn't I already kissing this woman? Why wasn't I naked, eating violets, and playing music under...

What is word for good together living? Nobody shits in the well?"I laughed. "Civilization?"He nodded...

Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or mor...

Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. I...

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if ...

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

We think our civilization near its meridian but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning...

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisf...

Without the library, you have no civilization.

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from th...

Somewhere on the Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will...

We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks… We need to vastly incre...

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and beco...

Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknow...

If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on ea...

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumsta...

My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands...

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation o...

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to ...

Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195

We’re living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequac...

During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposele...

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...