Civilization Quotes

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 F. Will

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

Luther Standing Bea

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

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

William Feathe

Simplicity is the peak of civilization.

Jessie Sampte

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

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942)

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 begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.

Will Durant

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

The measuring rod of a civilization is the prosperity of the masses.

Albert & Emily Vail, Transforming Light (pg 254)

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 very much an immature and ongoing experiment, the success of which is by no means yet proven.

Colin Turnbull, anthropologist, The Human Cycle

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

I think there are only three things America will be known for 2, 000 years from now when they study this civilization the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.

Gerald Early

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Arnold Toynbee

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

John Burroughs

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

Agnes Repplie

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

Charles Lindbergh

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

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

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

Erma Bombeck

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

Vince Lombardi

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

Jane Addams, Speech, Honolulu (1933)

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people - A black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Oscar Wilde

The true law of the race is progress and development. Whatever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.

Simms

Remember! Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights - Then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.

Endicott Peabody

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Will Durant

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

The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.

Andre Malraux