Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Civilization.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
Bertrand Russell
After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space -- to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.
H.P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft
Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
All our lauded technological progress -- our very civilization - is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
Albert Camus
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To us it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but this is a narrow view
We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way
George Bernard Shaw
It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depends. Historically this has been achieved by the influence of the various religious creeds and by traditions and superstitions which made man submit to those forces by an appeal to his emotions rather than to his reason. The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the powers of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them. This may well prove a hurdle which man will repeatedly reach, only to be thrown back into barbarism.
Friedrich A. Hayek
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
Henry James
Without winners, there wouldn't even be any civilization.
Woody Hayes
Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.
Henry David Thoreau
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
George Orwell
Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
Sigmund Freud
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
Ezra Pound
Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
Arnold J. Toynbee
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions
(When asked what he thought of Western civilization): 'I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi
This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.
Henry Miller
