Civilization quotes
2.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"Science is the most reliable guide for civilization, for life, for success in the world. Searching a guide other than the science is meaning carelessness, ignorance and heresy."
"Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock."
"Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization."
"The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt civilization."
"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside civilization — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense."
"There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."
"What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life"
"You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention."
"God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted in any civil state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls."
"Do the people of the world not yet realize that by fighting on until the bitter end I am not only performing my sacred duty to my people, but standing guard in the last citadel of collective security? Are they too blind to see that I have my responsibilities to the whole of humanity to face? I must still hold on until my tardy allies appear. And if they never come, then I say prophetically and without bitterness: The West will perish."
"Civilization owes to the Islamic world some of its most important tools and achievements...the Muslim genius has added much to the culture of all peoples."
"Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity."
"We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent."
"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."
"Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces."
"Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark."
"Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization."
"What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power."
"I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization."
"All civil states, with their officers of justice, in their respective constitutions and administrations, are proved essentially civil, and therefore not judges, governors, or defenders of the spiritual, or Christian, state and worship."
"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."
"Freemasonry is an institution founded on eternal reason and truth; whose deep basis is the civilization of mankind, and whose everlasting glory it is to have the immovable support of those two mighty pillars, science and morality."
"We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution."
