#Civilization Quotes

“It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.”

“Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.”

“In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.”

“As long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.”

“He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to themasterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.”

“The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”

“Let the river roll which way it will, cities will rise on its banks.”

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”

“May it not also be that the cause of civilization itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen? There never has been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into the past.”

“Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”

“If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.”

“The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.”

“In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.”

“Personally I think that private property has a right to be defended. Our civilisation is built up on property, and can only be defended by private property.”

“I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute a state. I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.”

“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.”

“Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilisation and lusty, famishing barbarism.”

“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”

“The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.”

“Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.”

“Fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves, where manners ne'er were preached.”

“Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.”

“Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation.”

“As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.”

“America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous.”

“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?”