Civilization Quotes
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.Oliver Wendell Holmes
Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.Jean Francois Revel
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 a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.Jane Addams, Speech, Honolulu (1933)
The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops? no, but the kind of man the country turns out.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude
Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.Oliver Wendell Holmes
Individual commitment to a group effort, that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.Vince Lombardi
The artist should be a seeing - Eye dog for a myopic civilization.Jacob Getlar Smith
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.Will Durant
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 more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life
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
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
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.Arnold Toynbee
One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.William Feathe
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.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.Barbara Tuchman
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.Will Durant
Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.Arnold Toynbee
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.Henry Kissinge
If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.Eugene V. Debs
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
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.John Burroughs
Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.Bishop Vincent
Civilization has been thrust upon me... and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.Luther Standing Bea
It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.Henry Allen
People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.Agnes Repplie
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
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft - Minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.Martin Luther King Jr.
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
Anglo - Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.William Jennings Bryan
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
What a time! What a civilization!Cicero
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.Mark Twain
Civilization is a slow process of adopting the ideas of minorities.Anonymous
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
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
