Civilization Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Nikola Tesla

L. Frank Baum

Richard Nixon

Karel Čapek

Lincoln Steffens

Georges Clemenceau

Abraham Flexner

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.

Man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

What kind of nation we will be, what kind of world we will live in, whether we shape the future in the image of our hopes, is ours to determine by our actions and our choices.
The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America—the chance to help lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil, and onto that high ground of peace that man has dreamed of since the dawn of civilization.
If we succeed, generations to come will say of us now living that we mastered our moment, that we helped make the world safe for mankind.
This is our summons to greatness.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Joseph Schumpeter

Civilization is hideously fragile, you know that; there's not much between us and the horrors underneath. Just about a coat of varnish, wouldn't you say.

For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.

Whittaker Chambers

We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, … the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.

Herbert Marcuse

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

If we don't change, our species will not survive... Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

Of the 1960s

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

Georges Bernanos

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

In our civilization, men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they may be considered only women.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Lincoln Steffens

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

The role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless... Islam was as guilty as all the rest.

John Henrik Clarke

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich