Civilization quotes
2.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside civilization — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice — that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law."
"It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with."
"If the family goes, so goes our civilization."
"Civilization involves subjection of force to reason, and the agency of this subjection is law."
"The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."
"Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live."
"Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization."
"The Imaginative Child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization"
"Since the main problem that American, the Afro- Americans have is a lack of cultural identity. It is necessary to teach [people] that they had some type of identity, culture, civilization before they were brought here."
"It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime."
"The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization."
"Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country."
"We all flow from one fountain- Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all."
"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual."
"It is Love that will save our world and our civilization."
"Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out."
"There has never been but one question in all civilization-how to keep a few men from saying to many men: You work and earn bread and we will eat it."
"Addiction is the number one disease of civilization, and it's directly and indirectly related to all other diseases. Besides physical addictions to nicotine, alcohol, and other substances, there are psychological addictions, such as the addiction to work, sex, television, melodrama, and perfection."
"The cash register did more for human morality than the Congregational Church. It was a really powerful phenomenon to make an economic system work better, just as, in reverse, a system that can be easily defrauded ruins a civilization. A system that's very hard to defraud, like a cash register, helped the economic performance of a civilization by reducing vice, but very few people within economics talk about it in those terms."
"A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it."
