Quotes About Civilization

One of the highest and surest signs of civilization is that a people have learned to obey the commands of those who are placed over them.

Their most important contribution to civilisation is that they were both neglectful of the child.

Underlying the whole scheme of civilization is the confidence men have in each other, confidence in their integrity, confidence in their honesty, confidence in their future.

At present society is composed, not so much of men and women, as of the raw material of men and women, which it will be the office of a higher civilization to work up into the forms of a truer manhood and womanhood.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

The English are slightly more civilized than anyone else has yet been. Also England is a good country for introverts; they have a place in society for the introvert, which the United States has not.

That proves something- that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.

That proves something—that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.

El nacimiento de una persona es de lo más desagradable. Es sucio, es extremadamente doloroso y a veces es peligroso. Siempre es sangriento. Pues lo mismo sucede con la civilización.

The chapter which concerned her began two hundred years ago and was played out in a proud society the bloodiest war and harshest peace in modern history could not destroy, returning, to be played out again on private ground in the twilight of a civilization no wars and no peace could save. Had she insight, could she have pierced

Had she been able to think, Jean Louise might have prevented events to come by considering the day's occurrences in terms of a recurring story as old as time: the chapter which concerned her began two hundred years ago and was played out in a proud society the bloodiest war and harshest peace in modern history could not destroy, returning, to be played out again on private ground in the twilight of civilization no wars and no peace could save.

Americans] have realized many things for which the rest of the world is still struggling...[yet] the civilization and the morals of the Americans fall far below their own principles.

the untold billions who led the bad life as mankind slowly built up the good life for you to lead. Do you ever think of all the people who suffered and died in misery and superstition while civilization was clicking forward one more slow notch?

United States is the first nation in the world to declare its independence, not because of any particular qualities or merits of its own, but because of rights which it shared with all men everywhere. In so doing, it declared the ground of government of the people, by the people, for the people in a sense absolutely unprecedented. In so doing, it laid an equally unprecedented claim to the character of the best regime of Western civilization.

Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?

Expression and communication are essential; without these, civilization ends.

Civilization is communication," the doctor said. "That which is not expressed doesn't exist.

I have thought that the word America must mean different things to the people who live under its aegis. I would that for each of them it might be symbolized by one -- at least one -- memory of some aspect of unspoiled nature. America -- wide, far-reaching, insouciant -- has been the amphitheater for our civilization. I wish each of us could appreciate its vast beauty, and could see how far the elements of our civilization fall short of the sheer majesty of our America.

All life began underneath the ocean. So I'm giving people a taste of what existence might have been like before civilization.' 'But we were amoebas and tiny shrimplike creatures. We didn't start off in deep-sea-diving outfits.' 'We all come into this world with an oxygen tube in our belly button.' 'True.' She put her hands up to her own belly. There had so recently been a sea creature evolving in there, trying its best to get its act together. It had perished under the deep, deep, deep sea.

I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.

If we haven't become the Liberty Party of an undoubted future, let us take this fact: the great totalitarian regimes have died. The Soviet Union broke up along ethnic lines, as we always thought it would. The Chinese - am I wrong? - are becoming a commercial civilization.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book 'Great War of Civilization,' and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.