We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.
Maurice Strong

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
Walter Bagehot

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot

The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization.
Otto Rank

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.
Mao Zedong

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.
Herbert Spencer

The condition of the tribes which occupy the country set apart for them in the West is highly prosperous, and encourages the hope of their early civilization. They have for the most part abandoned the hunter state and turned their attention to agricultural pursuits.
Martin Van Buren

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
Simone Weil

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
Simone Weil

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.
Pearl S. Buck

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.
Robert Green Ingersoll

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
Ezra Pound

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
Frantz Fanon

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.
Karl Kraus

The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.
Irving Babbitt

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
Henry James

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.
Henry James

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.
Edmund Hillary

We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
Jacob Bronowski