Civilization Quotes

We are all afraid - for our confidence for the future for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man every civilization has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one has made the Ascent of Man.

Jacob Bronowski

Civilization is just a slow process of learning to be kind.

Charles L. Lucas

Civilization is a movement - not a condition a voyage - not a harbour.

Arnold Toynbee

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

George Santayana

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond and on these faces there are no smiles.

Hilaire Belloc

A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Joseph Wood Krutch

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

Thomas Carlyle

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

John Ciardi

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

T.S Eliot

A tablecloth restaurant is still one of the great rewards of civilization.

Harry Golden

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you would civilize a man begin with his grandmother.

Victor Hugo

To be a man is to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world.

Antoine De Saint Exupery

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.

Elbert Hubbard

Nations like individuals live and die but civilization cannot die.

Guiseppe Mazzini

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

Arnold Toynbee

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

José Ortega y Gasset

Each new generation is a fresh invasion of savages.

Harvey Allen

Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

Elbert Hubbard

The human race has improved everything except the human race.

Adlai Stevenson

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

Alfred North Whitehead

There is such a thing as too much couth.

S.J. Perelman

We are in the first age since the dawn of civilization in which people have dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race.

Arnold Toynbee

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

Northrop Frye

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

W.H. Auden

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Isaac Asimov

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Arnold Toynbee

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

Will Durant

The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as "humanistic" ethics, has resulted in our "cut flower culture." Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality.

Will Herberg

I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.

David Mitchell

Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one likes about the past - without having to confront the bones, potsherds, and inscriptions which tell us that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes.

Ronald Wright

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.

Madeleine L'Engle

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.

Will Durant

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.

Jeanette Winterson

The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.

Alfred Nobel

the veneer of civilization is exceedingly thin

Karin Tansek

, civilization is an ever-changing tacit agreement, culturally inherited, not chosen at birth. Civilization is the invention of man, my big friend. It is a means of ensuring order and structure; it is man’s attempt to expunge all and every act of randomness from daily life. The ultimate goal of civilization is determinism, the complete absence of freewill. If everyone adhered to every rule, every demand, every decree of civilization, there would be no accidents, no arguments, no crime! Man would move through his life smoothly, like a well-oiled cog in a grandfather clock.

Peter Jelen

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

Will Durant

By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese.

Neal Ascherson

It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.

M.L Stedman

Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.

David Mitchell

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

Ludwig von Mises

He realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.

Wilson Rawls

‎I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.

Henry David Thoreau

Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.

Victor Davis Hanson

Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.

C.L.R. James

Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.

David Mitchell

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Émile Zola

A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.

Gustave Le Bon

Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.

Henry David Thoreau

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.

Malcolm Cowley

What is word for good together living? Nobody shits in the well?"I laughed. "Civilization?"He nodded, splaying his fingers: amusement. "Yes," he said. "Speaking with hands is civilization.""But smiling is natural," I protested. "Everyone smiles.""Natural is not civilization," Tempi said. "Cooking meat is civilization. Washing off stink is civilization.""So in Ademre you always smile with hands?" I wished I knew the gesture for dismay."No. Smiling with face good with family. Good with some friend.""Why only family?"Tempi repeated his thumb-on-collarbone gesture again. "When you make this." He pressed his palm to the side of his face and blew air into it, making a great flatulent noise. "That is natural, but you do not make it near others. Rude. With family..." He shrugged. Amusement. "...civilization not important. More natural with family.

Patrick Rothfuss

... civilization—a word that simply means "living in cities..."Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. “A History of the World In 6 Glasses.

Tom Standage

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.

Ivo Andrić

There’s just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.

Margaret Mitchell

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Civilization Quotes

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