Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Civilization.
The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.
Henry Miller
The civilized savage is the worst of all savages.
C. J. Weber
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
Virginia Woolf
Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.
Benjamin Disraeli
The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad--but whiskey!
Mark Twain
The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. . . . Civilisation is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilisation, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilisation there is always an element of unrest. For sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilised order survives on its merits, and is transformed by its power of Recognizing its imperfections.
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventur
The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality.
Seeing a murder on television can … help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.
Alfred Hitchcock
Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization
George Bernard Shaw
All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. . . For Truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of history in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity.
G. W. F. Hegel
It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies
No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.
Mahatma Gandhi
There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,-as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw
Henry David Thoreau
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
Havelock Ellis
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
Thomas Carlyle
Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few.
Benjamin Franklin
Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
