Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Civilization.
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.
Neil Gaiman
People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilization. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilization; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.
Kenneth Clark
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
Arnold J. Toynbee
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.
The human race has improved everything, but the human race.
Adlai Stevenson
The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.
David Hare
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry.The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
Will Durant
Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Pr?s: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.
Cyril Connolly
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.
Elbert Hubbard
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent
Bertrand Russell
Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.
Oscar Wilde
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
Victor Hugo
Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.
George Orwell
I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.
Kurt Vonnegut
Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
Ambrose Bierce
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities
Mark Twain
