Quotes About Civilization

Civilization must stand up and combat the current collapse of governance, the rise of violence, and the spread of chaos and fear in many parts of the world.

Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization's history. For some reason that simple truth has evaded everybody.

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

In all great epochs of history, the existence of standards - that is, the conscious adoption of type-forms - has been the criterion of a polite, well-ordered society; for it is a commonplace that repetition of the same things for the same purpose exercises a settling and civilizing influence on men's minds.

The practice of executing such offenders is a relic of the past and is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society.

Standing, as I believe the United States stands for humanity and civilization, we should exercise every influence of our great country to put a stop to that war which is now raging in Cuba and give to that island once more peace, liberty, and independence.

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.

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.

We seem to be trapped by a civilization that has accelerated many physical aspects of evolution but has forgotten that other vital part of man -- his mind and his psyche.

In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

What we might have been dealing with here - with the building of the Pyramids - is an age that got lost. Man had to learn again what they previously had known.

Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty.

The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor.

He whom we call a gentleman is no longer the man of Nature.

Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went to sea.

Monuments and archaeological pieces serve as testimonies of man's greatness and establish a dialogue between civilizations showing the extent to which human beings are linked.