Civilization Quotes

Civilization is hideously fragile and there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?

A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.

China is a civilization pretending to be a nation.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.

The vast upheaval of the World War set in motion forces that will either destroy civilization or raise mankind to undreamed of heights of human welfare and prosperity.

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

Standing, as I believe the United States stands for humanity and civilization, we should exercise every influence of our great country to put a stop to that war which is now raging in Cuba and give to that island once more peace, liberty, and independence.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.

Christianity is the very root and foundation of Western civilization.

Civilization can never be sustainable.

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.