Quotes on Civilization

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.

But that's just the aim of civilization - to make everything a source of enjoyment.

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.

We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words ‘Too Late’.

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

Some mothers in today's world feel "cumbered" by home duties and are thus attracted by other more "romantic" challenges. Such women could make the same error of perspective that Martha made. The woman, for instance, who deserts the cradle in order to help defend civilization against the barbarians may well later meet, among the barbarians, her own neglected child.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.