Top 460 Civilization Quotes

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

People now know how important it is to build secure systems to underlie our civilization.

I remember the moon landings, and Apollo was the paradigm by which all progress was measured at that time. And I knew that creating a true space-faring civilization was both possible and practical. What I failed to realize was that the effort would fail due to bureaucratic inertia and political apathy.

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

My whole thing is I’m not into civilization as a whole.

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.

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.

I have always believed that resistance against repression and violence is possible without relying on similar repression and violence. I have always believed that human civilization is the fruit of the effort of both women and men.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

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.

Every civilization is founded on sins – every single one. Dispossession, violence, appropriation. What distinguishes civilizations are the ones who rise above it.

There’s still racism. Western Europe… has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization’s hardest winters.

The Russian people and Russian culture are the linchpin, the glue that binds together this unique civilization.

I’m fairly certain that the seeds of Mel Gibson’s extraordinary work ‘The Passion of the Christ’ were sown long before Islamic fundamentalists delivered their abominable message to America and the entire Judeo-Christian civilization.

Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

George Bush doesn’t represent any civilization!

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

My argument is simple, which is, that for several thousand years in Western civilization, marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. Research is overwhelming that children need mothers and fathers.

It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime.

The vast upheaval of the World War set in motion forces that will either destroy civilization or raise mankind to undreamed of heights of human welfare and prosperity.

It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.

I should like to say that I am as proud of my Chinese heritage and background as I am devoted to modern science, a part of human civilization of Western origin, to which I have dedicated and I shall continue to dedicate my work.

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.

Civilization is going down the drain, and the sooner it does, the better.

We’re addicted to this concept of civilization – we can’t imagine living outside of it because we’ve had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

We’ve been playing games since humanity had civilization – there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It’s so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.

Compared with members of other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic.

My American undergraduate education probably gave me a better idea of the fundamentals of what European civilization is about, better than the undergraduate education you get at most European universities.

We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people – a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.

I think governments are the cancer of civilization.

From a distance, the American political system is a remarkable success. We have accomplished the peaceful transfer of power for more than two hundred years, and that’s unmatched by any civilization in human history. Up close, our political system still has all the ugliness and bad actors that you might suspect.

Thus, it was to seek true civilization and true justice for all the peoples of the world, and to view this as the destruction of personal freedom and respect is to be assailed by the hatred and emotion of war, and to make hasty judgments.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

Hip Hop is the rebirth of civilization. For people who were disconnected from their continent, from their language, from their culture, and from their ancestry, Hip Hop represented a step toward rediscovering what it means to be a Black American, or to be a Latino American.

The last struggle for our rights, the battle for our civilization, is entirely with ourselves.

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn… tired of common sense and civilization.

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.

Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.

Civilization is the lamb’s skin in which barbarism masquerades.

Arts are a luxury, proof that a civilization has risen above ‘politics and war.’

Indeed it is the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical and self-correcting – not only in producing wealth but over the whole range of human activities – that constitutes its most decisive superiority over any of its rivals.

There’s a film that I wrote that I want to do called ‘The Grey,’ which is about a group of pipeline workers in Alaska flying back into civilization after being remote for a number of months. The 737 they’re on goes down, and they begin to be hunted by a pack of rogue wolves.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

Internationalism is a community theory of society which is founded on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains that respect for a healthy development of human society and of world civilization requires that mankind be organized internationally.

In practice, the ocean is the world’s wildest place because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.