To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism.
Elihu Root

Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.
Christopher Dawson

Civilization never stands still; if in one country it is falling back, in another it is changing, evolving, becoming more complicated, bringing fresh experience to body and mind, breeding new desires, and exploiting Nature's cupboard for their satisfaction.
Arthur Keith

Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.
Henry Cabot Lodge

It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward.
Patrick Stewart

History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?
Christian Lous Lange

You can't leave civilization behind entirely.
Dirk Benedict

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.
John Fowles

It's the Law of God that gave the stability to Christian civilization.
Randall Terry

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.
Jose Bergamin

The world generally speaking is now drifting on a more and more devastating course towards the absurd target of extermination - or rather, to be more exact - of the northern hemisphere's towns, fields, and the people who have developed our civilization.
Alva Myrdal

The line of least resistance in the progress of civilization is to make that theoretical postulate real by the continually increasing force of the world's public opinion.
Elihu Root

At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.
Whittaker Chambers

The test of civilization is its estimate of women.
George William Curtis

Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us.
David Brin

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
John Perry Barlow

The vast upheaval of the World War set in motion forces that will either destroy civilization or raise mankind to undreamed of heights of human welfare and prosperity.
Arthur Henderson

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

This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.
Joseph Rotblat

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization.
Arthur Henderson