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Civilization Quotes
"Advanced weaponry, victories in battle and space travel do not an advanced species or civilization make."
36
"Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin."
36
"Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin."
36
"The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period."
35
"Tolerance is held to be a condition of mind which is encouraged by, and is necessary for, civilization."
35
"The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps."
34
"Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades."
34
"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."
34
"No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing."
34
"People in this civilization are starving in the middle of plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge."
34
"You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn."
34
"The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place."
34
"If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win."
33
"No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end."
33
"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."
33
"It's very difficult to marry into another civilization."
33
"The development of civilization was marked by constant changes. This will continue " therefore, the future will belong to people ready for change."
33
"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."
32
"Right now we're working on finishing up Pirates! for the Xbox, we're developing Civilization IV and we've got a couple other games in development that we'll tell you about soon."
32
"The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center."
32
"Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest."
31
"Give me civilization. I don't want to be pampered."
31
"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."
31
"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."
31
"Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children."
31
"Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity."
30
"Without winners, there wouldn't even be any civilization."
29
"When the toddler does something and there are consequences for his action civilization begins."
29
"Civilization is hideously fragile and there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish."
28
"After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization."
28
"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."
28
"Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting."
28
"A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization."
27
"It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization."
27
"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."
27
"When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it."
27
"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."
27
"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."
27
"The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on - I am not too sure."
27
"Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested."
26
"Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery."
26
"I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses."
26
"Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not."
25
"I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process."
25
"The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation."
25
"In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters."
24
"Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta."
24
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