Civilization Quotes

I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we're here. And we're trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization.

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.

This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other.

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.

India is a land of plenty inhibited by poverty; India has an enthralling, uplifting civilization that sparkles not only in our magnificent art, but also in the enormous creativity and humanity of our daily life in city and village.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

How a society treats its disabled is the true measure of a civilization.

Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind.

A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression.