The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.
Oriana Fallaci

Civilization grew in the beginning from the minute that we had communication - particularly communication by sea that enabled people to get inspiration and ideas from each other and to exchange basic raw materials.
Thor Heyerdahl

We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so.
Thor Heyerdahl

Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.
Daniel Webster

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
Daniel Webster

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

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.
Otto von Bismarck

Civilization is what makes you sick.
Paul Gauguin

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.
David Letterman

One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals.
Rutherford B. Hayes

As I have said for many years throughout this land, we're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.
Al Gore

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
E. M. Forster

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
E. M. Forster

We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about - farming replacing hunting.
Jacques Yves Cousteau

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.
Orson Welles

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 three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
Thomas Carlyle

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

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