Civilization Quotes

"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

"Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences"

John Buchan, Politician

"The last struggle for our rights, the battle for our civilization, is entirely with ourselves"

William Wells Brown, Activist

"Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge"

John Boyd Orr, Politician

"If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law"

John Boyd Orr, Politician

"There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time"

James H. Breasted

"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"

Stanley Crouch, Critic

"With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries"

William Irwin Thompson, Philosopher

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

Shirley Hazzard, Novelist

"The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era"

Story Musgrave, Astronaut

"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"

George Bancroft, Historian

"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"

G. Stanley Hall, Psychologist

"Each man has an equal social right to multiply his power of motion by all the social factors of civilization. Private property in any of these factors is inconsistent with this fundamental right; it must, obviously, prove a source of economic despotism and industrial slavery"

Daniel De Leon, Activist

"Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones"

Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Writer

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

Carrie P. Snow

"The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation"

Aharon Appelfeld, Novelist

"I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science"

Ann Druyan, Writer

"You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization"

Alan Rudolph, Director

"No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end"

Lawrence Clark Powell

"The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good"

L. Sprague de Camp, Author

"Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus"

Thomas Mellon, Businessman

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

Mikhail Gorbachev, Statesman

"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"

John Buchan, Politician

"In our western civilization we have the glorious example, the great standard of perfection and the teachings of the Christ to guide us. He acts for us as Mediator between our personality and our Soul"

Edward Bach, Scientist

"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"

Isaac Mayer Wise, Clergyman

"I ever will profess myself the greatest friend to those whose actions best correspond with their doctrine; which, I am sorry to say, is too seldom the case amongst those nations who pretend most to civilization"

J. G. Stedman, Soldier

"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"

Zahi Hawass, Scientist

"Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life"

Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Educator

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

Shirin Ebadi, Lawyer

"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"

Whittaker Chambers, Writer

"I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization"

Frantz Fanon, Psychologist

"A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization"

Charles Marion Russell, Artist

"Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles... respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law... or, in a word justice"

Max Nordau, Critic

"On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men"

Ignazio Silone, Author

"Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch to be handed down from race to race from age to age"

Kelly Millar

"There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization"

Arthur Erickson, Architect

"Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today"

Arthur Erickson, Architect

"All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization"

Gerald Durrell, Writer

"America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization"

John O'Hara, Writer

"It's just a show. It's not the end of Western Civilization. It's chewing gum"

Jerry Springer, Celebrity

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