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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"This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been."
"Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization."
"In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse."
"For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence."
"There's something about the style of living in the country that they feel, "This is what represents me." So style is about the philosophy of how we create our civilization."
"The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people."
"In yielding we are like the water, by nature placid, conforming to the hollow of the smallest hand; in time, shaping even the mountains to its will. Thus we keep duty and honor. We cherish clan and civilization. We are Chinese."
"One of the keys to ensuring accountability is to have civil servants who witness fraud, waste and abuse to blow the whistle."
"It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."
"Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe."
"Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion."
"History's villains are more easily recognized in retrospect. In an article published in 1935 and reprinted in 1937, Winston Churchill expressed a curious ambivalence towards the German chancellor prior to the outbreak of war: We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation. . . ."
"There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason."
"So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions."
"The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant."
"Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere."
"The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it."
"America seemed a virgin land waiting for civilization. But Europe had made the wilderness it found; America was not a virgin, she was a widow."
"The very essence of our civilization is that we give a paramount place to morality in all our affairs, public or private."
"Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin."
