Civilization Quotations

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

How a society treats its disabled is the true measure of a civilization.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

My view of civilization is that there have always been small pockets of good, decent, kind people surrounded by corrupt and evil power structures. It's always a battle to stay on the side of good.

Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds - it's the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters. Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy.

I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization.

The issue is whether the ultimate civil authority of the United States can tolerate actions in contempt of constitutional lines of authority. Any lessening of civil power over military power must inevitably lead away from democracy.

We've been playing games since humanity had civilization - there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It's so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.

The only people who steal are thieves, and that's a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will... return the benefit and reciprocate.

In our western civilization we have the glorious example, the great standard of perfection and the teachings of the Christ to guide us. He acts for us as Mediator between our personality and our Soul.

The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization.

The right to a quality education is, I believe, the perfect path to bridge the gap between different cultures and to reconcile various civilizations. Without such a right, the values of liberty, justice and equality will have no meaning. Ignorance is by far the biggest danger and threat to humankind.

Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.

Without winners, there wouldn't even be any civilization.

A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

Many people say I believe aliens built the pyramids. I don't. In fact I'm not a supporter of the 'ancient alien' hypothesis at all. I think a lost human civilization is a much better explanation of the mysteries and paradoxes of ancient cultures.

Movies are more than a commodity. Movies are to our civilization what dreams and ideals are to individual lives: They express the mystery and help define the nature of who we are and what we are becoming.

As a kid, I didn't need to be convinced the future promised peril and oppression, so when I started thinking up the middle-grade science fiction novel that became 'The Boy at the End of the World,' it seemed only natural to build the story around a dark vision of the future. In my book, civilization has nearly destroyed itself.

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?

Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization - is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it?

From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.

Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

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.

Artificial Intelligence leaves no doubt that it wants its audiences to enter a realm of pure fantasy when it identifies one of the last remaining islands of civilization as New Jersey.

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.

Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.

Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.

Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies.

Justice has nothing to do with victor nations and vanquished nations, but must be a moral standard that all the world's peoples can agree to. To seek this and to achieve it - that is true civilization

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.

The last struggle for our rights, the battle for our civilization, is entirely with ourselves.

But you have to understand, my beard is so nasty. I mean, it's the only beard in the history of Western civilization that makes Bob Dylan's beard look good.

Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus.

Civilization must stand up and combat the current collapse of governance, the rise of violence, and the spread of chaos and fear in many parts of the world.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

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.

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.

Monuments and archaeological pieces serve as testimonies of man's greatness and establish a dialogue between civilizations showing the extent to which human beings are linked.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Civilizations are not remembered by their business people, their bankers or lawyers. They're remembered by the arts.

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

Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

The solution to women’s issues can only be achieved in a free and democratic society in which human energy is liberated, the energy of both women and men together. Our civilization is called human civilization and is not attributed only to men or women.

Patriotism is an indispensable weapon in the defense of civilization against barbarism.

The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.

It seems to me we are now, since 1789, going through the same sort of process of regeneration the Roman world went through between 300 and 500. It is only to be hoped all civilization will not again be destroyed by the anarchists.

If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

It's just a show. It's not the end of Western Civilization. It's chewing gum.

On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

Western civilization shapes the content of my films, provides me with subjects that haven't been used before.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals.

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.

When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You've got to be there. You've got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.

Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress. But all of them, or almost all of the wars, have been trade wars.

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

Each man has an equal social right to multiply his power of motion by all the social factors of civilization. Private property in any of these factors is inconsistent with this fundamental right; it must, obviously, prove a source of economic despotism and industrial slavery.

The contribution of Islam to history and modern civilization is the product of the efforts of peoples of many races and tongues which came to accept its way of life.

To one who believes that really good industrial conditions are the hope for a machine civilization, nothing is more heartening than to watch conference methods and education replacing police methods

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

Tolerance is held to be a condition of mind which is encouraged by, and is necessary for, civilization.

There is increasing social concern about our use of nonhumans for experiments, food, clothing and entertainment. This concern about animals reflects both our own moral development as a civilization and our recognition that the differences between humans and animals are, for the most part, differences of degree and not of kind.

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

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

For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.

The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.