Civilization Quotes

"What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power"

"Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding"

Kathryn Bigelow, Director

"Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition"

T-Bone Burnett

"No administration could stop the tidal wave of immigration that swept over the land; no political party could restrain or control the enterprise of our people, and no reasonable man could desire to check the march of civilization"

Nelson A. Miles, Soldier

"The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins"

Jose Saramago, Writer

"A Christian people who have for two hundred years kept a race in bondage, deprived of the advantages of civilization and religion, owe them a debt of gratitude which it would seem ungenerous to withhold"

Nelson A. Miles, Soldier

"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"

Hervey Allen, Author

"Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous 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

"A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind"

John Lothrop Motley, Historian

"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"

Henry Cabot Lodge, Politician

"Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us"

David Brin, Author

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

Dean Koontz, Author

"The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized"

Alva Myrdal, Diplomat

"But you have to understand, my beard is so nasty. I mean, it's the only beard in the history of Western civilization that makes Bob Dylan's beard look good"

Bill Walton, Athlete

"The world generally speaking is now drifting on a more and more devastating course towards the absurd target of extermination - or rather, to be more exact - of the northern hemisphere's towns, fields, and the people who have developed our civilization"

Alva Myrdal, Diplomat

"What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete"

Alfred de Vigny, Poet

"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual"

John Muir, Environmentalist

"Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top"

Timothy Leary, Educator

"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization"

Arnold J. Toynbee, Historian

"I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills"

Arnold J. Toynbee, Historian

"So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die"

William Morris, Designer

"The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism"

Mikhail Gorbachev, Statesman

"In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions"

Max Lerner, Journalist

"If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed"

Ludwig von Mises, Economist

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

Shirley Hazzard, Novelist

"If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization"

Ludwig von Mises, Economist

"Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive"

Arthur Henderson, Politician

"It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms"

Arthur Keith, Scientist

"The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization"

Mikhail Gorbachev, Statesman

"Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?"

Pierre Schaeffer, Composer

"We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex"

Marion Zimmer Bradley, Writer

"When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"Since the dawn of time, traditional marriage - the union between one man and one woman - has been the building block of civilization, and at no point in our nation's history has that foundation been under more severe attack than now"

Jim DeMint, Politician

"To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher"

Arthur Holly Compton, Scientist

"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"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

"The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines"

Thomas B. Macaulay, Historian

"Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male"

Max Lerner, Journalist

"Well, we can't afford blindness anymore. There are tens of thousands of thugs who loathe liberty and love death, and want to annihilate Western civilization"

Tony Snow, Journalist

"I've managed to dodge the curse. Not all my family have. Of course, music helped me - music is all about civilization, about something worthwhile. It's all about ideas"

Gordon Getty, Businessman

Page 5 of 9