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Top Civilization Quotes

Browse top 901 famous quotes and sayings about Civilization by most favorite authors.

Favorite Civilization Quotes

1. "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
Author: Arnold J. Toynbee
2. "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."
Author: Arthur Henderson
3. "It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was conceived...And there can be no other path by which a fiercely competitive, yet social species, as humanity, can afford its members the level of safety, prosperity and stability—such that we enjoy now— without its initial pangs of cannibalism, brutality, dominance and cruelty to forge the foundations, very much like the lava which formed the ground upon which we now stand. Lava still erupts from the core. Brutality, Dominance, and Cruelty similarly erupt from ours; and they are no less prevalent now than in early human history."
Author: Ashim Shanker
4. "The method of doubt must be applied to civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence."
Author: Charles Fourier
5. "Women might just have something to contribute to civilization other than their vaginas"."
Author: Christopher Buckley
6. "Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.--Alexander Supertramp, May 1992"
Author: Christopher McCandless
7. "We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we helped them make a civilization, didn't we? And why? I said I didn't know; it was beyond me. Because, he said, we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers."
Author: Clive Barker
8. "Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul."
Author: E.M. Forster
9. "A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession."
Author: Emil Cioran
10. "Morrow […] felt that OASIS had evolved into something horrible. "It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity. A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect."
Author: Ernest Cline
11. "I go forward slowly, dead, and my vision is no longer mine, it's nothing: it's only the vision of the human animal who, without wanting, inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that constitute the civilization in which I feel.Where can the living be?"
Author: Fernando Pessoa
12. "We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected."
Author: Friedrich Hayek
13. "IF we desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one."
Author: G.K. Chesterton
14. "Because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulcher of Christ. But being in a civilization which does believe in this dogma of fact for facts' sake, we do not see the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole."
Author: G.K. Chesterton
15. "The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid."
Author: Gever Tulley
16. "America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black."
Author: Harold Rosenberg
17. "Thus, it was to seek true civilization and true justice for all the peoples of the world, and to view this as the destruction of personal freedom and respect is to be assailed by the hatred and emotion of war, and to make hasty judgments."
Author: Hideki Tojo
18. "Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable."
Author: Iris Murdoch
19. "It's the beat generation. It's the begát. It's the beat to keep. It's the beat in the heart. It's being beat and down in the world and like old time low down. And like an ancient civilization, the slave boatman rowing galleys to a beat."
Author: Jack Kerouac
20. "Life was dense, dark, ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way"
Author: Jack Kerouac
21. "We are in a mutually dependent society, called civilization, and government is the oil that keeps it running and the lifeblood that carries oxygen to the various parts of the civic body."
Author: Jack Lessenberry
22. "Civilization in its present form hasn't got long."
Author: James Lovelock
23. "It's just a show. It's not the end of Western Civilization. It's chewing gum."
Author: Jerry Springer
24. "I often think of it this way: The 21st century is going to be a war on the attention of humanity. Where civilization focuses its attention, I mean, that's what defines what the civilization cares about."
Author: Jesse Schell
25. "Paleoclimatic records show clearly that the past 10,000 years, the Holocene, is a remarkably stable period in which we went from being a few hunters and gatherers to become more sedentary agriculture-based civilizations, which then moved us to the current populated modern era."
Author: Johan Rockstrom
26. "R.C. Sproul has written that "we live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization." As far as my fundamentalist upbringing goes, Noll says that for the kind of thinking that embraces society, the arts, the human person, and nature—"for that kind of thinking the habits of mind fundamentalism encouraged can only be called disaster."
Author: John Piper
27. "For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him"
Author: Jostein Gaarder
28. "Civilization is faces, "appearances": when these collapse, civilization collapses as well."
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
29. "The veneer of civilization is exceedingly thin"
Author: Karin Tansek
30. "Some instinct older than civilization was telling her to run, to flee. She didn't move."
Author: L.J. Smith
31. "On the top of my desk there are initials, carved into the wood, and dates...This carving, done with a pencil dug many times into the warn varnish of the desk, has the pathos of all vanished civilizations. It's like a handprint on stone. Whoever made this was once alive."
Author: Margaret Atwood
32. "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."
Author: Nelson A. Miles
33. "If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity."
Author: Paul Collins
34. "Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members."
Author: Pearl S. Buck
35. "To explore strange new worlds ... and assimilate them.To seek out new life forms ... and new civilizations ... and assimilate them.To boldly go where no Borg has gone before ... and assimilate them."
Author: Peter David
36. "If love is under siege, it is because it threatens the very essence of commercial civilization. Everything is designed to make us forget that love is our most vivid manifestation and the most common power of life that is in us. Shouldn't we wonder how the lights that glimmer in the eye can blow a fuse for a time, even as barriers of oppression break and jam our passions? Yet despite a life stunted and distorted by mediated Spectacle, nothing has ever managed to strip love of its primal force. Although the heart's music fails to overwhelm the cacophony of profit efficiency, bit by bit it composes our destinies, according to tones, chords, and dissonances which render us happy if only we learn to harmonize the scattered notes that string emotions together."
Author: Raoul Vaneigem
37. "Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere."
Author: Richard Bach
38. "The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well they must be far from civilization."
Author: Sagan, Carl
39. "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
Author: Samuel P. Huntington
40. "Color Theory"How yellow the sky how little the understandingIntangible the things we know for sureDusty silica clouds over Europe the very same dayWe brought our baby home His second Too yellowFor comfort Too sleepy Just sleepy enoughFor us to sleep ourselves That was last nightToday the clouds shift Outside shifts Rain and shadowsA mezzotint glow Then no glow Heart or soulExactly seven pounds of civilizationHematochrome and skin and bilirubinYawns blinks and can't make up his made-up mindThe atmosphere can't keep its own eyes openWe can't keep our own eyes closed"
Author: Stephen Burt
41. "It was very relaxing to be away from civilization, and this bothered me. I should not have found the loneliness so welcoming."
Author: Stephenie Meyer
42. "The senior wizards of Unseen University stood and looked at the door.There was no doubt that whoever had shut it wanted it to stay shut. Dozens of nails secured it to the door frame. Planks had been nailed right across. And finally it had, up until this morning, been hidden by a bookcase that had been put in front of it.'And there's the sign, Ridcully,' said the Dean. 'You have read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door"?''Of course I've read it,' said Ridcully. 'Why d'yer think I want it opened?''Er ... why?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.'To see why they wanted it shut, of course.' This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking."
Author: Terry Pratchett
43. "The queen appeared as innocent as one of those mountains which smoke a little, and then one day end up causing a whole civilization to become an art installation"
Author: Terry Pratchett
44. "If there are no books. There is no civilization."
Author: Thomas Cahill
45. "I could see how this civilization will be totally wreckedif all true records of human prehistory are made public."
Author: Toba Beta
46. "Take now the clockworks... The clockworks, being genuine and not much to look at, don't generate the drama of an Earth-tilt or a flying saucer, nor do they seem to offer any immediate panacea for humanity's fifty-seven varieties of heartburn. But suppose that you're one of those persons who feels trapped, to some degree, trapped matrimonially, occupationally, eductionally or geographically, or trapped in something larger than all those; trapped in a system, or what you might descrbie as an "incresingly deadening technocracy" or a "theater of paranoia and desperation" or something like that. Now, if you are one of those persons... wouldn't the very knowledge that there are clockworks ticking away behind the wallpaper of civilization, unbeknownst to leaders, organizers and managers (the President included), wouldn't that knowledge, suggesting as it does the possibility of unimaginable alternatives, wouldn't that knowledge be a bubble bath for your heart?"
Author: Tom Robbins
47. "Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in the bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy uber alles. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and riving an entire civilization insane. Don't spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming."
Author: Tom Robbins
48. "In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquility was to be found there."
Author: Wilfred Thesiger
49. "The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian."
Author: William Gilmore Simms
50. "The last struggle for our rights, the battle for our civilization, is entirely with ourselves."
Author: William Wells Brown
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It is an old and wise caution, that when our neighbor's house is on fire, we ought to take care of our own. For tho', blessed be God, I live in a government where liberty is well understood, and freely enjoy'd; yet experience has shown us all that bad precedent in one government is soon set up for an authority in another; and therefore I cannot but think it mine, and every honest man's duty that we ought at the same time to be upon our guard against power, wherever we apprehend that it may affect ourselves or our fellow subjects.I should think it my duty, if required, to go to the utmost part of the land, where my service could be of any use in assisting to quench the flame of prosecutions upon informations, set on foot by the government, to deprive a people of their right to remonstrating (and complaining too) of the arbitrary attempts of men in power."
Author: Andrew Hamilton

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