Civilization Quotes

For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.

Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.

We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

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

Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so.

Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us.

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward.

Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding.

To one who believes that really good industrial conditions are the hope for a machine civilization, nothing is more heartening than to watch conference methods and education replacing police methods.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

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

If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

The test of civilization is its estimate of women.

Feminists are in an untenable position, defending something they no longer believe in, and which history will force them to recognize was destructive of most of the central pillars of civilization. I'm just the first one to point it out publicly.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.