Civilization Quotes - Page 58

Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.

It is an altogether wrong idea that the modern product of civilization is less susceptible to love. I sometimes think it is the other way.

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.

My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about.

Civilization changes man on the outside. Meditation softens him within, through and through.

Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.

The civilization of a state should be measured by the amount of suffering it prevents and the degree of happiness it makes possible for its citizens.

... one can judge a civilization by the way its treats its women.

There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.

There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.

When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.

Hate-on-the-highway is an institution occupying a high place in our modern civilization....The godawful glares that drivers exchange as they pass each other, the mutual hatred between motorist and pedestrian, these manifestations seem to constitute the ultimate in righteous wrath.

In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.

To spread healthy ideas among even the lowest classes of people, to remove men from the influence of prejudice and passion, to make reason the arbiter and supreme guide of public opinion; that is the essential goal of the sciences; that is how science will contribute to the advancement of civilization, and that is what deserves protection of governments who want to insure the stability of their power.

We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.

There are few substance to which it yields interest, when it is considered how very intimately the knowledge and properties and uses of iron is connected with human civilization.

We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket.

I think we overrate ourselves in terms of our abilities and capacities. I mean, just because you can build a really swell bridge doesn't, to my way of thinking, mean that you're an advanced civilization.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.