Civilization quotes
2.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside civilization — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: "Home is home, be it never so homely.""
"Marriage is the beginning and pinnacle of civilization."
"The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization."
"If I should be fated to walk no more with Nature, be compelled to leave all I most devoutly love in the wilderness, return to civilization and be twisted into the characterless cable of society, then these sweet, free, cumberless rovings will be as chinks and slits on life's horizon, through which I may obtain glimpses of the treasures that lie in God's wilds beyond my reach."
"It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair."
"Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."
"There is no life without guilt anyway, at least in the Western world. I think in other civilizations it might be different but if the world is getting Westernized all over, guilt will enter through the technology and democracy and their actions. It will come side by side so there won't be anymore innocent societies in the future I think which in fact is not such a bad thing."
"Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries."
"True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read."
"The path of civilization is paved with tin cans."
"A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed."
"Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?"
"Religion is civilization, the highest."
"Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization."
"And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization."
"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level."
"Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy."
"If we want our civilization to survive, we have to watch for the extremes. We have to reclaim our morality, both individually and as the society. To protect ourselves from extremisms, we have to maintain moderation."
"A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance."
"A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them."
