Civilization Quotes

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

Early civilizations complained about still earlier ones, much as we do about both.

Author Unknown

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 the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Arnold Toynbee

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 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

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

Vince Lombardi

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

Hunter S. Thompson

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

Luther Standing Bea

I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

Charles Lindbergh, Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper (letter to the editor)

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.

Robert Ingersoll

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.

Henry Kissinge

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

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

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

Arnold Toynbee

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

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

Bishop Vincent

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

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

Civilization is a transient sickness.

Robinson Jeffers

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

The artist should be a seeing - Eye dog for a myopic civilization.

Jacob Getlar Smith

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

Walter Bagehot

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

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

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 degrades the many to exalt the few.

Amos Bronson Alcott, Table Talk (1877)

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

If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.

Stanley Garn

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two - Thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.

Albert Einstein

When vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead, it is time to pause and wonder.

David Browe

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life