Civilization Quotes

On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.

Ignazio Silone

Individual commitment to a group effort - That is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Vince Lombardi

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

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

William Feathe

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

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Arnold Toynbee

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

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Georges Clemenceau

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

Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness".

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Mark Twain

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

Mikhail Gorbachev, June 8, 1990

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Oscar Wilde

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

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

Bishop Vincent

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

Sigmund Freud, (Attributed)

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

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

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

Walter Bagehot

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

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 Will

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 14

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

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

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

Will Durant

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

Brian Aldiss

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Civilization is a transient sickness.

Robinson Jeffers

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 slow process of adopting the ideas of minorities.

Anonymous

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

Vine Deloria

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 is built on a number of ultimate principles... respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law... or, in a word justice.

Max Nordau

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

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Arnold Toynbee