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 fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible."
"In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization."
"Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us."
"The terrorists, they have the wrong perception. They believe that the other group is trying to destroy them as a religion, as a civilization. So they want to abolish us, to kill us before we can kill them. And the antiterrorist may think very much the same way - that these are terrorists and they are trying to eliminate us, so we have to eliminate them first. Both sides are motivated by fear, by anger, and by wrong perception."
"All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood."
"Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer."
"No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization."
"Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph."
"Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material."
"When I was young I used to read about the decline of Western civilization, and I decided it was something I would like to make a contribution to."
"I think we overrate ourselves in terms of our abilities and capacities. I mean, just because you can build a really swell bridge doesn't, to my way of thinking, mean that you're an advanced civilization."
"We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket."
"Today, however, those things which occupy us in the field of education are the interests of humanity at large and of civilization, and before such great forces we can recognize only one country-the entire world."
"The civilization of a state should be measured by the amount of suffering it prevents and the degree of happiness it makes possible for its citizens."
"Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair."
"We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge"
"Simplicity is the peak of civilization."
"My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about."
"That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man."
"One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left."
