Civilization Quotes

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."
-Oscar Wilde

"A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan."
-Martin Luther King Jr.

"Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos."
-Will Durant

"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual."
-John Muir

"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
-Milton Friedman

"Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few."
-Amos Bronson Alcott

"Civilization is hideously fragile and there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish."
-Carrie P. Snow

"If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends."
-Orson Welles

"If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power."
-Harriet Martineau

"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."
-John Perry Barlow

"New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you."
-David Letterman

"It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it."
-Henry Allen

"Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization."
-Florence Nightingale

"The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place."
-Havelock Ellis

"The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself."
-Robert Ingersoll

"It is impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and with 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can't read."
-Newt Gingrich

"The test of civilization is the estimate of woman. Among savages she is a slave. In the dark ages of Christianity she is a toy and a sentimental goddess. With increasing moral light, and greater liberty, and more universal justice, she begins to deve."
-George William Curtis

"Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men."
-Jane Addams

"Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else."
-Julian Jaynes

"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."
-Arnold Toynbee

"Underlying the whole scheme of civilization is the confidence men have in each other, confidence in their integrity, confidence in their honesty, confidence in their future."
-Bourke Cockran

"When a civilization takes up the study of itself, it is always high noon."
-Michael Mooney

"The slum is the measure of civilization."
-Jacob Riis

"Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason."
-Theodore Dreiser

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

"Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities."
-Mark Twain