Civilization Quotes

"The test of civilization is its estimate of women"

"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"

Orson Scott Card, Writer

"Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization"

Naguib Mahfouz, Novelist

"I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good"

Mary Douglas, Scientist

"Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization"

G. M. Trevelyan, Historian

"It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization"

Agnes Repplier, Writer

"Internationalism is a community theory of society which is founded on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains that respect for a healthy development of human society and of world civilization requires that mankind be organized internationally"

Christian Lous Lange, Politician

"The sovereign state has in our times become a lethal danger to human civilization because technical developments enable it to employ an infinite number and variety of means of destruction"

Christian Lous Lange, Politician

"I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it - not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization"

Harry S. Truman, President

"Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization"

Daniel Webster, Statesman

"When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization"

Daniel Webster, Statesman

"As I have said for many years throughout this land, we're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change"

Al Gore, Vice President

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

Woody Hayes, Coach

"A lot of people thought of me as a threat to Western civilization"

John Milius, Director

"Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years"

John Burroughs, Author

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

Barbara Tuchman, Historian

"The only people who steal are thieves, and that's a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will... return the benefit and reciprocate"

Michael Nesmith, Musician

"The condition of the tribes which occupy the country set apart for them in the West is highly prosperous, and encourages the hope of their early civilization. They have for the most part abandoned the hunter state and turned their attention to agricultural pursuits"

Martin Van Buren, President

"Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it"

Joseph Heller, Novelist

"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards"

Walter Bagehot, Author

"Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place. The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West"

Ida B. Wells, Activist

"Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there"

Goldwin Smith, Historian

"Justice has nothing to do with victor nations and vanquished nations, but must be a moral standard that all the world's peoples can agree to. To seek this and to achieve it - that is true civilization"

Hideki Tojo, Soldier

"This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization"

Joseph Rotblat, Physicist

"I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act"

Joseph Rotblat, Physicist

"If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age"

Jacques Barzun, Educator

"If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends"

Orson Welles, Actor

"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"

Jacques Ellul, Philosopher

"For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization"

Robert A. Heinlein, Writer

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Poet

"In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear"

Paul Harris, Entertainer

"You can't leave civilization behind entirely"

Dirk Benedict, Actor

"Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin"

Henry Cabot Lodge, Politician

"The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization"

Oriana Fallaci, Journalist

"The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period"

Oriana Fallaci, Journalist

"There is every indication that we are to see new developments of the power of aggregated capital to serve civilization, and that the new developments will be made right here in America"

William Graham Sumner, Businessman

"The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism"

Irving Babbitt, Critic

"Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about"

Seth Lloyd, Educator

"A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces"

Jose Bergamin, Writer

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

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Poet

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