Civilization famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.
-- A. A. Gill -
A dialogue among civilizations can be seen as a dialogue between the individual and the universal.
-- Abdelaziz Bouteflika -
If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.
-- Abdelaziz Bouteflika -
Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.
-- Abdelaziz Bouteflika -
In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.
-- Abdus Salam -
As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.
-- Abraham Joshua Heschel -
To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
The human race has improved everything, but the human race.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson -
To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization.
-- Adrienne Clarkson -
English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.
-- Agnes Repplier -
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
-- Aharon Appelfeld -
Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
Apart from God nothing matters. We think that health matters, that freedom matters, or knowledge or art or civilization. And but for one insistent word they would matter indeed. That word is eternity.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
As I have said for many years throughout this land, we're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.
-- Al Gore -
CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.
-- Al Gore -
Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.
-- Al Gore -
The consensus is clear. We need an immediate and determined shift to a clean, renewable economy. The continued mass burning of fossil fuels is inconsistent with a healthy, prosperous future for our civilization.
-- Al Gore -
Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with our planet. Unless we quickly and profoundly change the course of our civilization, we face an immediate and grave danger of destroying the worldwide ecological system that sustains life as we know it.
-- Al Gore -
Our way of life is at stake, our grandchildren are at stake, the future of civilization is at stake.
-- Al Gore -
I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
-- Alan Bennett -
It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
-- Alan Bennett -
Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors--is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.
-- Alan Kay -
I feel like we're between two great possibilities: we're either going to turn things around, and in this generation see the rising sun of a new moral dedication in America, or we're going to lose the struggle for that moral renewal, throw away the basic principles on which our life and civilization is based, and head toward a new century that will make the 20th century look like a dress rehearsal for evil.
-- Alan Keyes -
The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.
-- Alan Paton -
You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.
-- Alan Rudolph -
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
-- Albert Camus -
A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.
-- Albert Camus -
Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.
-- Albert Camus -
Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents
-- Albert Camus -
Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilization in high boots
-- Albert Einstein -
More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else...All our lauded technological progress-our very civilization-is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
-- Albert Einstein -
Fertility of the soil is the future of civilization.
-- Albert Howard -
He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America ... The Philippines are ours forever. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world.
-- Albert J. Beveridge -
The civilization of a country consists in the quality of life that is lived there, and this quality shows plainest in the things that people choose to talk about when they talk together, and in the way they choose to talk about them.
-- Albert J. Nock -
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
-- Aldo Leopold -
Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
-- Aldo Leopold -
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
-- Aldous Huxley -
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
-- Aldous Huxley -
The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .
-- Aldous Huxley -
Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded "I ate civilization.
-- Aldous Huxley -
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.
-- Aldous Huxley -
An important aspect of the Eurasian worldview is an absolute denial of Western civilization. In the opinion of the Eurasians, the West with its ideology of liberalism is an absolute evil.
-- Aleksandr Dugin -
The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
Labor is the fruit of civilization, not the basis of it.
-- Alexander Crummell -
Strong drink stupefies a man and makes it possible for him to forget; it gives him an artificial cheeriness, an artificial excitement; and the pleasure of this state is increased by the low level of civilization and the narrow empty life to which these men are confined.
-- Alexander Herzen -
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.
-- Alexander Herzen -
Civilization is not a burden. It is an opportunity.
-- Alexander Meiklejohn -
Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
-- Alexander Pushkin -
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.
-- Alfred de Vigny -
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.
-- Alfred Russel Wallace -
Modern civilization is a product of an energy binge. Binges often end in hangovers.
-- Alfred W. Crosby -
"Motherboard," for me, has four different levels: the bottom part is the water, vegetation, and growth. The second part is the world with figures and animals; there's chaos and civilization. The third part is the digital zone - these red things are turning into really loud digital sounds. Then the fourth level is like ether and things turning into air. This idea of how we're becoming partly digitalized is really interesting to me.
-- Ali Banisadr -
Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk.
-- Alice Meynell -
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
-- Allan Bloom -
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
-- Allan Bloom -
Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds - it's the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters. Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy.
-- Allan Savory -
The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the biggest false God, Jehovah, in middle of western civilization.
-- Allen Ginsberg -
Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine -
The world generally speaking is now drifting on a more and more devastating course towards the absurd target of extermination - or rather, to be more exact - of the northern hemisphere's towns, fields, and the people who have developed our civilization.
-- Alva Myrdal -
The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.
-- Alva Myrdal -
Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.
-- Alvar Aalto -
Many countries today have begun the transition from an industrial wealth system and civilization to a knowledge-based system - without appreciating that a new wealth system is impossible without a corresponding new way of life.
-- Alvin Toffler -
A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.
-- Alvin Toffler -
By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.
-- Alvin Toffler -
The political technology of the Industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.
-- Alvin Toffler -
In the name of a greater civilization, we curse those who for the sake of their ambitious dreams, brought about the massacre of so many young lives. No matter how brutal the crime, you will always get glorification of its heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture.
-- Amadeo Bordiga -
But once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world.
-- Amartya Sen -
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 very fragile, all it takes is a few decades of chaos for us to forget humanity and turn into animals. Our base natures can take over very fast. We can forget that we are sentient beings, with laws and codes and ethics.
-- Amish Tripathi -
The moral development of a civilization is measured by the breadth of its sense of community.
-- Anatol Rapoport -
If civilization is in danger today... it will do so with the enthusiastic assistance of credulous people. They seem to me more dangerous than the most brazen leaders, because everything is done with their cooperation.
-- Anatoly Kuznetsov -
The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.
-- Andre Malraux -
Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.
-- Andre Malraux -
Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.
-- Andre Malraux -
Artists are a free society's greatest advocates and its best bulwarks. Their triumphs are civilization's triumphs.
-- Andres Serrano -
The Mother's knowledge of unity, her powers of sensitivity, humility, and balance, and her infinite respect for the miracle of all life have now to be invoked by each of us and practiced if the 'masculine' rational imbalance of our civilization is to be righted before its too late.
-- Andrew Harvey -
Lemon Tree is well worth seeing as a first-class artistic achievement bridging two civilizations.
-- Andrew Sarris -
There is no escaping this fight. It is civilization or Jihadism. We can and should debate tactics; but the sides are clear enough.
-- Andrew Sullivan -
We might as well expect to grow trees from leaves as hope to build up a civilization or a manhood without taking into consideration our women and the home life made by them Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society. Teach them that there is a race with special needs which they and only they can help; that the world needs and is already asking for their trained, efficient forces.
-- Anna Julia Cooper -
What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.
-- Anne Rice -
We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
-- Anthony Burgess -
Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life.
-- Anthony Daniels -
The real triumph of civilization is the extent to which coercion is banished from human relations.
-- Anthony Gregory -
We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.
-- Anthony Marra -
To be a man is to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Extremes produce reaction. Beware that our boasted civilization does not lapse into barbarism.
-- Antoine Rivarol -
The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.
-- Antonio Tabucchi -
The luxuries of civilization satisfy only those wants which they themselves create.
-- Apsley Cherry-Garrard -
The law should be the point at which savagery ended because civilization stood in its path.
-- Ariana Franklin -
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.
-- Ariel Durant -
Civil confusions often spring from trifles but decide great issues.
-- Aristotle -
Christ did not come to civilize. He came to save. Civilization is not the solution; it does not destroy the works of the devil. All civilization aims at world improvement, at the gradual elimination of the curse; it is a process of evolution. It is like a man who is suffering from a terrible disease, and the physician who comes to help him gives him a salve to apply. He treats the skin symptoms but the source of the disease he never considers and never touches. Such is a boasted and progressive civilization. It is a delusion.
-- Arno C. Gaebelein
