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Civilization Quotes


"A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed."


"Give me civilization. I don't want to be pampered."


"But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors."


"I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise."


"Without winners, there wouldn't even be any civilization."


"What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete."


"In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions."


"The city has become a serious menace to our civilization... It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant."


"Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them."


"For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed."


"The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center."


"Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity."


"If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win."


"Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta."



"Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting."


"Tolerance is held to be a condition of mind which is encouraged by, and is necessary for, civilization."


"The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization."


"When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it."


"The first requisite of civilization is that of justice."


"In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear."


"This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other."


"The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented."


"By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else."


"I think governments are the cancer of civilization."


"The condition of the tribes which occupy the country set apart for them in the West is highly prosperous, and encourages the hope of their early civilization. They have for the most part abandoned the hunter state and turned their attention to agricultural pursuits."


"When the toddler does something and there are consequences for his action civilization begins."


"Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization."


"Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not."


"The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture."



"In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters."



"Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery."


"Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity."


"No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion."


"Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others."


"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."


"It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization."


"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."


"Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama."


"A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization."


"I would say practical progressive, which means that the Republican party or any political party has got to recognize the problems of a growing and complex industrial civilization. And I don't think the Republican party is really wide awake to that."


"Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity."


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


"A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression."


"Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place. The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West."


"I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses."


"I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not."


"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."


"Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants."


"The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it."
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