Popular quotes about Civilization! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
If we have an element of Americans here that reject western civilization, and that's a big element, that reject western civilization, then what have we? This is an effort on the left I think to break down the American civilization and the American culture and turn it into something entirely different.
Steve KingThe worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. They can persuade and can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better and the worse. Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however, unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilization there is always an element of unrest.
Alfred North WhiteheadCivilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures. ... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies. ... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable.
Isabelle EberhardtI had a map on my wall that had a circle around Lubbock and then giant arrows pointing toward New York City and Los Angeles. Written across both arrows were the words 'Toward Civilization.' Of course, by the time I got to New York, I realized there really isn't any civilization.
Barry CorbinCivilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.
HerbertThere is a dichotomy between people who feel economic principles should order human civilization and people who believe humanitarian principles should order human civilization. That essential disagreement is underlying practically all our world drama.
Marianne WilliamsonEvery system tries to get people to conform to support that system. That goes for communism, socialism, free enterprise, or any other civilization. If they don't demand loyalty, they can't keep their civilization together. So what they do is they teach things that would support an established system. We do not advocate an established system. TVP talks of an emergent system into state of change. So that we always prepare people for the next changes coming ahead. So that people will not cling to the past.
Jacque FrescoThe Seascapes are before human beings and after human beings. The Seascapes were there before our presence, and when our civilization is over, seascapes will still exist. Our presence is temporary. Civilization is only 5,000 to 6,000 years. The history of ours, the material history of consciousness, is rather short.
Hiroshi SugimotoA legacy that powerful does not disappear. Next to the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans were babies. Our modern nations like Great Britain and America? Blinks of an eye...The very oldest root of civilization, at least of Western civilization, is Egypt. Look at the pyramid on the dollar bill. Look at the Washington Monumentโthe worldโs largest Egyptian obelisk. Egypt is still.......very much alive.
Rick RiordanCivilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.
Henri Frederic AmielThe world's most 'primitive' people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation.
Marshall SahlinsI saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
Alan BennettThere is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting.
John Ralston SaulThis knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for all of the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself.
John F. KennedyEvery civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
Aldous HuxleyWomen's fight for equal rights is essentially a humanist and peaceful struggle for true democracy, and a higher form of civilization.
Leyla ZanaThe curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
Martin Luther King, Jr.The Philippines are ours forever. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America.
Albert J. BeveridgeThe only true hope for civilization-the conviction of the individual that his inner life can affect outward events and that, whether or not he does so he is responsible for them.
Stephen SpenderIn careless ignorance they think it civilization, when in reality it is a portion of their slavery...To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false pretenses, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
TacitusI have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.
Mark TwainCivilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.
Sigmund FreudA useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.
Vaclav SmilNot only is patriotism disdained, the very basis for pride in one's country and culture is systematically undermined in our educational institutions at all levels. The achievements of western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west.
Thomas SowellThe woman movement is one which is uniting by co-operating influences, all the antagonisms that are warring on the family state. Spiritualism, free love, free divorce, the vicious indulgences consequent on unregulated civilization, the worldliness which tempts men and women to avoid large families, often by sinful methods, thus making the ignorant masses the chief supply of the future ruling majorities; and most powerful of all, the feeble constitution and poor health of women, causing them to dread maternity as--what it is fast becoming--an accumulation of mental and bodily tortures.
Catharine BeecherIs civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?
Mary Baker EddyIt 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. ThompsonIs a civilization worth the name, which requires, for its existence the very doubtful prop of a racial legislation and a lynch law?
Mahatma GandhiThere is nothing - not any religious or secular body of work - that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.
Dennis PragerFor it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.
John SteinbeckSo long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.
William MorrisMy characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.
Robert E. HowardWhat men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.
Anatole FranceCulture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society
Edward Burnett TylorAs long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThose who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.
George Bernard ShawIt's more eerie to be alone in a city that's lit up and functioning than one that's a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards.
Isaac MarionThe time has come for everybody -capitalists, communists, socialists- to ask themselves what 'civilization' really means. If not, whether a country calls itself capitalist or communists, in the pursuit of 'progress' , it will visit genocide either on its own people or on another people whose country must be plundered for resources to feed the Progress industry.
Arundhati RoyThe human race has reached a turning point. Man has opened the secrets of nature and mastered new powers. If he uses them wisely, he can reach new heights of civilization. If he uses them foolishly, they may destroy him. Man must create the moral and legal framework for the world which will insure that his new powers are used for good and not for evil.
Harry S. TrumanWhat is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world's population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority.
Immanuel WallersteinA race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North WhiteheadJustice has nothing to do with victor nations and vanquished nations, but must be a moral standard that all the world's peoples can agree to. To seek this and to achieve it - that is true civilization
Hideki TojoThey offer me neither food nor drink - intellectual nor spiritual consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilization which we have already attained.
John Maynard Keynes