"Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island."
Read quote
15 likes
Civilization quotes
Civilization
2.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Civilization
Browse quotes that often appear alongside civilization — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Civilization quotes (page 10 of 119)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers."
Read quote
15 likes
"I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living."
Read quote
15 likes
"Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization."
Read quote
15 likes
"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."
Read quote
14 likes
"Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization."
Read quote
14 likes
"Civilization is sterilization."
Read quote
14 likes
"A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments trappings of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society."
Read quote
14 likes
"The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination."
Read quote
14 likes
"A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization."
Read quote
14 likes
"I think [contacting an alien civilization] would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low."
Read quote
14 likes
"Change no man’s religion, change no man’s politics, interrupt the sovereignty of no nation. Instead, teach Man to use what he has and what he knows to the factual creation, within any political reference, of a civilization on Earth for the first time."
Read quote
14 likes
"We made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends."
Read quote
14 likes
"In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates."
Read quote
14 likes
"A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization."
Read quote
13 likes
"It's my guess that something like 5% of GDP goes to money management and itsattendant friction. I define it broadly - annuities, incentive pay, all trading, etc. Nobody else has used figures that high, but that's my guess. Worst of all, the people doing this are among the best and the brightest. Hundreds and thousands of engineers, etc. are going into hedge funds and investment banking. That is not an intelligent allocation of the brainpower of the civilization."
Read quote
13 likes
"Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent"
Read quote
13 likes
"To be a man is to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world."
Read quote
13 likes
"A UNITED civilization is possible only when human relations are balanced in all transactions which have to do with the distribution of the values of life which all men persistently and constantly seek."
Read quote
13 likes
"Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission."
Read quote
13 likes