Civilization Quotes

Nothing distresses the civilized person like unfettered nature. The Grand Canyon seen from behind the railing is indeed a splendid sight, but as soon as the desert reclaims your golf course that is another matter altogether.

~ Anthony Marais

We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.

~ Alistair Maclean

The oldest profession [prostitution] is the most honest, for it exposes the bare bones of what civilization is all about. It's the root of all professions.

~ Daniel Suelo

A Greek invention, democracy is highly overrated. For starters, it never worked in Greece. The first philosophers were fascists and, even today, 2,500 years later, the cradle of Western civilization remains an incompetent state. Roman emperors and a vengeful, authoritarian God are the true European success stories.

~ Thorsten J. Pattberg

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power.

~ Julian Huxley

After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

~ Joe Haldeman

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his 'Every Change Is for the Worse' should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.

~ Joseph Heller

What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will.

~ Paulette Jiles

Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.

~ G.k. Chesterton

But, for myself, the Earth’s records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

But the bars that held you, the bars that kept you in were the luxury and soft living. It is hard to walk out on a thing like that

~ Clifford D. Simak

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Our Freedoms come from those that keep our beliefs, our ideology, and lifestyle safe. You may never know who they are but salute their presence. Their only glory is knowing we recognize their efforts even if they are but ghosts.

~ Hunter Blacke

An urbanite does not become a civilized person just because he has had an education. What one assimilates in the city is book-learning and knowledge derived through emulating educated men. But that alone will not make him a civilized person. A man of simple tastes becomes complex through education because he desires to become complex. That is why a lot of educated men enjoy vulgar and obscene things. The cinema has become a vulgar philistine art form. The enormous motor car with its bloated body is a vulgar vehicle. It is difficult to create a complex thing without some vulgarity and grossness. Amongst the things valued by the educated, it is difficult to find things untainted by vulgarity. People who cannot distinguish between grossness and refinement are not uncommon among the urban educated because for many, the measure of civilization is its complexity.

~ මාර්ටින් වික්‍රමසිංහ

I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions.

~ Lily King

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach — see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience — is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions.

~ Nick Bostrom

Somewhere on the Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save The World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle.

~ Ray Bradbury

We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks… We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies… We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century… A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks.

~ Ray Kurzweil

If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,(...) I am tame. I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time every night. I even drink about the same amount too much. I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of dirty stories— generally the same dirty stories. You may assure my friends, Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization has thoroughly tamed.

~ G.k. Chesterton

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

~ Jimmy Carter

The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!

~ James C. Scott

That frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device; the more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier underwrote popular freedom.

~ James C. Scott

[What do you want to be when you grow up?] A wrecker of civilizaton

~ Sasha Grey

The civilizations barter in coldness; they peddles it, reinforces it, market it, entices with it, reward it, and then flees from it when it's unchecked force is too much to marvel at. Soon absolute zero will be on sale, and people will warm up to that notion as well.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.

~ Will Durant

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.

~ Lawrence Clark Powell

Bell defined civilization in the language of a Bloomsbury connoisseur: ‘A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality, and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery, a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self-expression and for a liberal education, a contempt for utilitarianism and philistinism, in two words – sweetness and light.’ Bell argued that ‘as a means to good and as a means to civility a leisured class is essential’. The Bloomsbury group was necessary because ‘It is only when there come together enough civilized individuals to form a nucleus from which light can radiate, and sweetness ooze, that a civilization becomes possible. The disseminators of civilization are therefore highly civilized men and women forming groups sufficiently influential to affect larger groups, and ultimately whole communities.

~ Richard Davenport-Hines

Of course I realized that the Protestants denominations of the world have grown and matured over the years, but maybe we should not throw away the gains of the old Protestants that brought us to our modern day civilization.

~ Sunday Adelaja

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

~ Antonio Gramsci

Those who haven't been exposed to the hypocrisies of a civilized education react to things 'naturally', as they happen. It is in the here and now that they are either happy or unhappy, joyful or sad, interested or indifferent.

~ Henri Charrière

Why wasn't I already kissing this woman? Why wasn't I naked, eating violets, and playing music underneath the open sky?Looking around the room again, everything seemed terribly ridiculous. These people sitting on their benches wearing layers on layers of clothing, eating with knives and forks. It all struck me as so pointless and contrived. It was incredibly funny. It was like they were playing a game and didn't even realize it. It was like a joke I'd never understood before.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.

~ Robert Graves

They believe civilization weakens natural selection. They do nature’s work so that we do not become a soft race.

~ Pierce Brown

Civilization is a scheme to hide nakedness.

~ Marty Rubin

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men, it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art, it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past.

~ Will Durant

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.

~ Jack Vance

The fleeting systems lapse like foam,' he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach. He was appalled by the thought. Where four million people disported themselves, the wild wolves roam to-day, and the savage progeny of our loins, with prehistoric weapons, defend themselves against the fanged despoilers. Think of it! And all because of the Scarlet Death—

~ Jack London

And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace--and with what confidence?

~ John Irving