Civilization Quotes

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.

Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.

Civilization does not consist in the eschewing of garlic or the keeping clean of a man’s finger-nails. It may lead to such delicacies, and probably will do so. But the man who thinks that civilization cannot exist without them imagines that the church cannot stand without the spire.

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants.

To us it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but this is a narrow view.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, window on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet) “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, […]

I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting. In Australia, where people are few, and rabbits are many, I watched the whole populace satisfying the primitive impulse in the primitive manner by the […]