Quotes on Civilization

The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the future of Christian civilisation.

If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.

Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.

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.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards

The human race has reached a turning point. Man has opened the secrets of nature and mastered new powers. If he uses them wisely, he can reach new heights of civilization. If he uses them foolishly, they may destroy him. Man must create the moral and legal framework for the world which will insure that his new powers are used for good and not for evil.

Imagine a survivor of a failed civilization with only a tattered book on aromatherapy for guidance in arresting a cholera epidemic. Yet, such a book would more likely be found amid the debris than a comprehensible medical text.

All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

"The making of peace is a continuing process that must go on from day to day, from year to year, so long as our civilization shall last."

Civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation._x000D_ _x000D_ Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

For an America of wisdom that honors the family, knowing that if the family goes, so goes our civilization.

In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.

A tree is beautiful, but what's more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples' character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe. ... What a terrible future!

Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Civilization begins with distillation