Civilization Quotes
-
On the future of the U.S., or of Western civilization in general, I tend to be quite pessimistic. I would say that today I see most of the symptoms of societies on the brink of collapse, not just in the U.S., but in the tightly interconnected societies of Western civilization - now essentially world civilization.
Arthur Demarest
-
Civilization has taught man how to live in dense crowds, and by that very fact those crowds are likely ultimately to constitute a majority of the world’s population. Already there are many who prefer this crowded life, but there are others who do not, and these will gradually be eliminated. Life in the crowded conditions of cities has many unattractive features, but in the long run these may be overcome, not so much by altering them, but simply by changing the human race into liking them.
Charles Galton Darwin
-
If we don't watch out, the pleasure o be gained from the discriminating enjoyment of food will be lost. It may not be long before the art of fine cooking is viewed as the invention of a handful of snobs. . . . A whole aspect of living well, of civilization itself, is threatened with extinction.
Benoîte Groult
-
The test of civilization is the estimate of woman.
George William Curtis
-
A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Will Durant
-
To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.
Victor Hugo
-
Civilization is over-rated, but there isn't much else.
Theodore Roethke
-
Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back.... its triumphal march is the progress of civilization.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
-
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
Thomas Sowell
-
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
Will Durant
-
You cannot force growth of human life and civilization, any more than you can force these slow-growing trees. That is the economy of Almighty God, that all good growth is slow growth.
William Jay Gaynor
-
And again, we're kind of trying to be in that place, that's just so absurd and irreverent and hysterical and it's something that at our company we're kind of, we're so irreverent about everything, we're sort of irreverent about the establishment, we're irreverent about civilization, we're irreverent about philosophy, we're irreverent about religion.
Brian Henson
-
If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
Terence McKenna
-
There is a strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards, or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheelhorses necessary to a stable civilization, but history, even current history in the newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits willing to do battle for new ideas.
Gertrude Atherton
-
The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.
Will Durant
-
Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
Ray Bradbury
