Civilization Quotes
Albert Camus
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
2482 Robert Bringhurst
If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
1581 Peter Thiel
No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: It’s going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world.
1573 Sara Sheridan
I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints.
3232 Leo Tolstoy
Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.
1942 Mokokoma Mokhonoana
All civilized wo/men are prostitutes: Some sell what's between their legs; the rest sell what's between their ears.
2355 Richard M. Rorty
My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
3919 Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The employed are punished by having to do what they do not love. The self-employed are punished by the opposite.
3367 Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The more civilized people are, the more honorable working hard is to them. As a result, the more civilized we get, the less we live.
4997 Floriano Martins
There is no way I can avoid thinking about the kind of world I belong to. The abuse of utopias disfigures everything.
3391 Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me...
4205 Toba Beta
When people stargazing, they stare at stars,
and many other things which they've already
presumed commonly and universally as stars.
3551 Toba Beta
People usually feel funny, smile and laugh when I tell them
about my strong belief in the very existence of prehistoric
advanced technology and great civilizations of wilier races.
I just can't wait to see their faces at time the truth is revealed.
2908 Toba Beta
Science is a trigger of changes of civilization.
Religion is the failsafe of science performance.
1919 Daniel Quinn
You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives - and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it? - your captivity and the captivity of the world.
4593 Daniel Quinn
The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.
2247 Theodor W. Adorno
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
2881 Daniel Quinn
The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.
3405 Daniel Quinn
If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right - it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.
2139 Daniel Quinn
[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.
2599 Aberjhani
Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.
3259 Daniel Quinn
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.
4420 Daniel Quinn
This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.
2023 Daniel Quinn
If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.
1725 Daniel Quinn
[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.
3705 Daniel Quinn
This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.
4640 Kurt Vonnegut
I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.
1382 Holly Estil Cunningham
Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes the milder form of rivalry which is the motive force of the great portion of the serious labors of mankind.
2823 Alan W. Watts
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
4353 Richard Francis Burton
Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.
1885 Adam Smith
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
1883 James A. Michener
Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.
3626 Robert McKee
No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
1138 W.E.B. Du Bois
The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
4441 Iain Pears
Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed.
4316 Toba Beta
Music and symbols, they're older than human race.
Prehuman beings used them to teach early mankind.
3798 Émile Zola
Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
3095 Charles Stross
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
3911 Anaïs Nin
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
4752 Swami Dhyan Giten
A child comes from God, a child
is a gift from God, but a child is
not our possession.
Give the child unconditional love
and freedom. Respect the child, the child has its own soul. The child has its own way.
2382 Will Durant
So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.
4982 Thomas E. Woods Jr.
The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange-all sponsored by the Church-provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.
1033 Martin J. Rees
The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein - humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth
2225 Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
2471 Elizabeth Goudge
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...
3509 John Derbyshire
Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt.
4653 Alexander Solzhenitsyn
in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.
1431 Pierce Brown
They believe civilization weakens natural selection. They do nature’s work so that we do not become a soft race.
3527 Swami Dhyan Giten
The hardest time in this world is for the sensitive and intelligent people.
4179 John Mark Reynolds
while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.
3176 Gil A. Waters
Good sex is the basis of any truly civilized society.
4348 Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Morals are nothing but a civilized society’s attempt to tame some beast called man.
4530 Tom Robbins
The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.
1369 Julian Barnes
The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.
1504 Evelyn Waugh
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.
2663 Henry David Thoreau
Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.
3225 Roger Zelazny
There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
3179 Albert Einstein
This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!
1227 Mark Skousen
The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.
2529 David Baldacci
All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.
4068 Herman Melville
The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.
2709 Keith Lowe
Los británicos, al igual que los estadounidenses, recuerdan la Segunda Guerra Mundial como una época en la que su mejor generación salvó al mundo de la maldad del nazismo.
2892 Jack Cady
The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of others. The writer and the artist appeal to that humanity. For that reason, literature and art are the bones of civilization.
3584 Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.
4063 Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Back then: to be regarded as well-known, one had to be great. Today: to be regarded as great, one has to be well-known.
3351 W.A.R. Gibb
The Message of Mohammad is not a set of metaphysical phenomena. It is a complete civilization.
2694 K. Hari Kumar
Not just charity, even corruption begins at home.
2516 Amit Kalantri
A civilization must be judged by its standards not by its expenditure.
2873 Jared Diamond
Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
4829 William Barrett
The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.
2171 Pramoedya Ananta Toer
I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.
2279 Christopher Hawke
The earth is an orbiting speck in incomprehensible vastness. The histories of our civilizations, our accomplishments and secrets, great good and evil - these are no more significant than the single twinkle of a star. Perhaps, this is why we try to outshine the heavens with our cities and make theatrical events of our simple lives.
1021 Walter A. McDougall
America's civilization perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.
4799 Jeanette Winterson
There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.
4963 Victor Davis Hanson
Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.
1382 Stephen Colbert
Throughout human history, countries rise and fall. But not America-we continue to rise and rise, like dough, until Jesus bakes us in the fiery Afterscape of the Rapture.
2021 Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thanks to arranged marriages: There are countless women who have never been their husband's girlfriend.
3847 Matthew Woodring Stover
Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.
2745 Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Nations rise and fall, flourish and decay, by what they believe in and by what their culture stands for.
4280 Alfred Nobel
The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.
4724 Lauren Willig
Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.
2541 Jack D. Forbes
The "norm" for humanity is love.
Brutality is an aberration.
We are not sinners by nature.
We learn to be bad.
We are taught to stray from our good paths.
We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.
4418 Elie Wiesel
We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not.
3875 Derrick Jensen
We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.
1450 Terry Pratchett
I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly.
He appeared to consider this. "Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?
4743 Jimmy Carter
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
2859 Pramoedya Ananta Toer
I've often heard people say, “Your country is beautiful, a virtual paradise.” When will the people of Indonesia be as beautiful as their land, with a civilization and culture that contributes to the greater beauty of humankind and no longer smothers and strangles the mind?
1982 Sigmund Freud
I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
4084 Yukichi Fukuzawa
In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.
3235 Anthony Marra
We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.
4137 David Mitchell
I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.
1753 Emma Goldman
Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.
3767 Altiero Spinelli
Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.
2618 Mark Skousen
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.
1766 Haruki Murakami
The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.
3410