Civilization Quotes

• Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

  Vernon Lee

  Barbarians, Use, Complicated

  Vernon Lee (1904). “Hortus vitae : essays on the garden of life”

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• The charms of seclusion are seldom combined with the conveniences of civilization.

  Ethel Smyth

  Charm, Convenience, Seclusion

  Ethel Smyth (1922). “Streaks of life”

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• The mystery school continued throughout the greater Egyptian civilization, which was the second age of humankind and later on into the third age of humankind when the Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan high cultures flourished

  Frederick Lenz

  School, Egyptian Civilization, Chinese

  Frederick Lenz (1994). “Surfing the Himalayas: conversations and travels with Master Fwap”, Interglobal Seminars

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• Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril.

  James Hansen

  Climate, World, Earth

  James Hansen (2011). “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity”, p.4, A&C Black

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• How sad that men would base an entire civilization on the principle of paternity, upon the legal owership and presumed responsibility for children, and then never really get to know their sons and daughters very well.

  Phyllis Chesler

  Daughter, Children, Responsibility

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• Wise cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization, and the best result which life has to offer us,--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction in finer form, of all our havings.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wise, Flower, Play

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.3037, Delphi Classics

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• The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Grace, Gentleman

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.3070, Delphi Classics

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• Our early 21st century civilization is in trouble. We need not go beyond the world food economy to see this. Over the last few decades we have created a food production bubble-one based on environmental trends that cannot be sustained, including overpumping aquifers, overplowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

  Lester R. Brown

  Aquifers, Land, Atmosphere

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• The consensus is clear. We need an immediate and determined shift to a clean, renewable economy. The continued mass burning of fossil fuels is inconsistent with a healthy, prosperous future for our civilization.

  Al Gore

  Prosperous Future, Healthy, Needs

  "Climate change report: 'The worst is yet to come' - as it happened" by Helen Davidson, Adam Vaughan, www.theguardian.com. March 31, 2014.

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• How is the newcomer to deal with Rome? What is one to make of this marble rubble, this milk of wolves, this blood of Caesars, this sunrise of Renaissance, this baroquery of blown stone, this warm hive of Italians, this antipasto of civilization?

  Shana Alexander

  Rome, Blood, Sunrise

  Shana Alexander (1970). “The feminine eye”, McCall Pub. Co

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• Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.

  Ruth Benedict

  Society, Analysis, Culture

  Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.278, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless. It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradles not only cities, but civilizations - and seen them die, and seen new ones born again - Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

  Beryl Markham

  Men, Race, Land

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• [T]he true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy personal psychological needs... but lack the ideas or the means to contribute to the technical base.

  E. O. Wilson

  Mean, Ideas, Psychological Needs

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• We're headed for what is called Type 1 Civilization, planetary civilization. Type 2 would be stellar civilization, like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization would be galactic, like Star Wars. We are Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But the question is: Will we make it? Will we make the transition from Type 0 to Type 1? It's not clear.

  Michio Kaku

  Stars, War, Oil

  "'It's all because of physics': an interview with Michio Kaku". Interview with Matt Fulkerson, www.theshorthorn.com. February 20, 2015.

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• We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit.

  Henry George

  Justice, Brotherhood, Progress

  Henry George (1898). “Social Problems”

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• Civilization, stretching up to recognize that every child is a portion of State wealth, may presently make some movement to recognize maternity as a business or office needing time and strength, not as a mere passing detail thrown in among mountains of other slavery.

  Miles Franklin

  Children, Office, Mountain

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• The world of dance is a natural world from which civilization has divorced many of us by making it appear remote - something reserved for the few who have a special talent.

  Margot Fonteyn

  Dance, Special, World

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• Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection.

  Lucio Russo

  Writing, Optimistic, Views

  Lucio Russo, Silvio (translator) Levy (2013). “The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn”, p.8, Springer Science & Business Media

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• the present Western civilization ... is dominated by the extravert viewpoint. There are plenty of reasons for this domination: extraverts are more vocal than introverts; they are more numerous, apparently in the ratio of three to one; and they are accessible and understandable, whereas the introverts are not readily understandable, even to each other, and are likely to be thoroughly incomprehensible to the extraverts.

  Isabel Briggs Myers

  Three, Viewpoints, Ratios

  Isabel Briggs Myers, Peter B. Myers (1995). “Gifts differing: understanding personality type”, Davies-Black Publishing

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• The city an epitome of the social world. All the belts of civilization intersect along its avenues. It contains the products of every moral zone. It is cosmopolitan, not only in a national, but a spiritual sense.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Spiritual, Cities, World

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• Togetherness, for me, means teamwork. It makes us reflect how completely dependent we are upon one another in our social and commercial life. The more diversified our labors and interests have become in the modern world, the more surely need to integrate our efforts to justify our individual selves and our civilization.

  Walt Disney

  Teamwork, Mean, Self

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• The time has come for everybody -capitalists, communists, socialists- to ask themselves what 'civilization' really means. If not, whether a country calls itself capitalist or communists, in the pursuit of 'progress' , it will visit genocide either on its own people or on another people whose country must be plundered for resources to feed the Progress industry.

  Arundhati Roy

  Country, Mean, People

  Source: www.soldefter.com

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• What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality - the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all of psychotherapy.

  Brock Chisholm

  America, Morality, Propaganda

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• Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

  Gertrude Atherton

  Years, Certain, Thousand

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• 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

  Strong, Reading, Moving

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