To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.
Arnold J. Toynbee

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

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
Thomas B. Macaulay

Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.
Clare Boothe Luce

So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.
William Morris

Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.
William Jennings Bryan

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.
Raoul Vaneigem

In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.
Paul Harris

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.
Orson Scott Card

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Cyril Connolly

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.
James Lovelock

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.
Mason Cooley

Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
Bryant H. McGill

Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.
Arthur Erickson

What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.
Arthur Erickson

There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization.
Arthur Erickson

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.
Herbert Read

The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.
Stephen Gardiner

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.
Herbert Read

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