Civilization Quotes

“Air power may either end war or end civilization.”

“Books, in all their variety, offer the human intellect the means whereby civilisation may be carried triumphantly forward.”

“While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually, it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil.”

“The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.”

“The greatest advances in human civilization have come when werecovered what we had lost: when we learned the lessons of history.”

“Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.”

“There is nothing that sets a nation back as far in civilization as prosperity.”

“It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.”

“We should lay aside every hindrance and endeavour by uniting the whole force and spirit of our people to raise again a great British nation standing up before all the world; for such a nation, rising in its ancient vigour, can even at this hour save civilization.”

“Civilisation is hooped together, broughtUnder a rule, under the semblance of peaceBy manifold illusion.”

“Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.”

“Civilization has taught us to eat with a fork, but even now if nobody is around we use our fingers.”

“But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.”

“We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.”

“The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.”

“The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”

“You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.”

“Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.”

“A republic may be called the climate of civilization.”

“No doubt it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. That work is already advanced and is making progress every day. But man must be civilized also in relation to nature.”

“To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.”

“Among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solutions to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized expertise... The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application.”

“It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory”

“Civilization depends on morality.”

“What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?”