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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"Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history's great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time."
"Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress."
"Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?"
"Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold."
"Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet."
"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct."
"By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death"
"Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization."
"Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented."
"It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization."
"In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization."
"The most enduring contributions made to civilization have not been made by brawn, they have been made by brain."
"If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization."
"No greater tragedy exists in modern civilization than the aged, worn-out worker who after a life of ceaseless effort and useful productivity must look forward for his declining years to a poorhouse. A modern social consciousness demands a more humane and efficient arrangement."
"Unless we stop the degradation of our oceans, marine ecological systems will begin collapsing and when enough of them fail, the oceans will die. And if the oceans die, then civilization collapses and we all die"
"What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation."
"If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilizations escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite."
"K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere."
"The sum of the whole matter is this - our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually."
"No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."
