Civilization Quotes

If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force.
Auberon Herbert

Bad, Sacrifice, Cannot

Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.
Serj Tankian

Love, Peace, Failure

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.
Friedrich Engels

Greed, Spirit, Driving

You know when civilization began? With the invention of the mirror.
Shimon Peres

Mirror, Invention, Began

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

Give, Serious, Question

Well, I think, you know, the arts are really what - one of the things that make this country strong. We always think it's our economy or our military power, but in fact, I think it's our culture, our civilization, our ideas, our creativity.
Caroline Kennedy

Power, Strong, Country

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

Past, Down, Happen

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

Purpose, Means, Culture

The slum is the measure of civilization.
Jacob Riis

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.
Margaret Mitchell

Money, Made, Realize

A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.
Tahar Ben Jelloun

Themselves, Possible, Exist

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.
Lawrence Clark Powell

Great, True, End

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

Result, Modern, Taught

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

History, Whole, Deadly

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
Nikki Giovanni

True, Made, Same

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

Forward, Else, Few

Tolerance is held to be a condition of mind which is encouraged by, and is necessary for, civilization.
Arthur Keith

Mind, Tolerance, Necessary

The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization.
Karen Horney

Person, Perfect, Normal

Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.
Mary Baker Eddy

Life, Society, Science

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.
Jose Saramago

Change, Through, Before

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.
Stephen Gardiner

Lost, Culture, Western

You can't leave civilization behind entirely.
Dirk Benedict

Leave, Behind, Entirely

Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.
Arthur Henderson

War, Human, Suffering

He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.
Arthur Henderson

Peace, War, Danger

I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise.
Arthur Henderson

Values, Economic, Survive

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

History, War, Become

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

War, Human, Either

I would seriously question whether anybody is really foolish enough to really say what they mean. Sometimes I think that civilization as we know it would kind of break down if we all were completely honest.
Elizabeth Hurley

Mean, Down, Enough

Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease or any other chronic disease of civilization.
Andrew Weil

Heart, Whether, Fat

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

Different, Weight, Loses

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