Quotes on Civilization

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

In peace, the Middle East, the ancient cradle of civilization, will become invigorated and transformed. Throughout its lands there will be freedom of movement of people, of ideas, of goods.

The Filipino embraces civilization and lives and thrives in every clime, in contact with every people.

No one ceases to be a man, no one forfeits his rights to civilization merely by being more or less uncultured, and since the Filipino is regarded as a fit citizen when he is asked to pay taxes or shed his blood to defend the fatherland, why must this fitness be denied him when the question arises of granting him some right?

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded upon the spirituality of work.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

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

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.

Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

Champagne is the wine of civilization and the oil of government.

Everything progresses in waves. The march of civilization, the progression of worlds, is in waves. All human activities likewise progress in waves - art, literature, science, religion.