Civilization Quotes

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

We strain to tell Americans and aliens in this country that there's nothing unique about America, nothing unique about American civilization, nothing that requires their allegiance, nothing of great value that they should sacrifice for.

Civilization is what makes you sick.

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

Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization.

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.

Patriotism is an indispensable weapon in the defense of civilization against barbarism.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

For all of higher civilization's recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family.

Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.

I feel this is very important for us to have serene buildings because our civilization is chaotic as it is, you see; our whole machine age has brought about a chaos that has to be somehow counterbalanced, I think.

We need to shift from an economic organizing principle for human civilization, to a humanitarian organizing principle. Making money more important than your own children is a pathological way for an individual to run their affairs, and it's a pathological way for a society to run its affairs.

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.

The city has become a serious menace to our civilization... It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.

Civilization, we shall find, like Universalism and Christianity, is anti evolutionary in its effects; it works against the laws and conditions which regulated the earlier stages of man's ascent.

By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else.

Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.

Without winners, there wouldn't even be any civilization.

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

Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.

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