Human Civilization Quotes

• Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Moving, Writing, Fighting

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• The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Life, Peace, War

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• It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Witty, Humorous

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• We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Inspirational, Responsibility, Science

  Richard P. Feynman (2015). “The Quotable Feynman”, p.359, Princeton University Press

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• Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.

  Sigmund Freud

  Race, Civilization, Unity

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.

  Will Durant

  Order, Civilization, Liberty

  "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers". Book by Will Durant, 1926.

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• Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Responsibility, Unreasonable, Human Race

  Richard P. Feynman (2015). “The Quotable Feynman”, p.359, Princeton University Press

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• We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

  Eric Berne

  Sad, Knowing Who You Are, Civilization

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• But in practical affairs, particularly in politics, men are needed who combine human experience and interest in human relations with a knowledge of science and technology.

  Max Born

  Men, Technology, Scientific Method

  "My Life & My Views". Book by Max Born, 1968.

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• We need to shift from an economic organizing principle for human civilization, to a humanitarian organizing principle. Making money more important than your own children is a pathological way for an individual to run their affairs, and it's a pathological way for a society to run its affairs.

  Marianne Williamson

  Running, Children, Civilization

  "Gabrielle Bernstein Interviews Marianne Williamson: Sister Giant". Interview with Gabrielle Bernstein, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 16, 2012.

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• We have progressed in a technological sense, but I'm not so sure whether we have progressed in a civilizational matter - the quality of the civilization has not improved. It's a civilization that's in love with technology but forgetting about the human side of it and the destructive tendency in human civilization has not been faced.

  Laszlo Nemes

  Technology, Civilization, Quality

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Humankind is able to create new conditions, a new reality. We are not fated to swim forever among the realities that are here now. ... Everything that is worthwhile in human civilization has not only originated from but has been inspired by dreams, by imagination.

  Pramoedya Ananta Toer

  Dream, Reality, Civilization

  Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1996). “Footsteps”, Penguin Group USA

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• A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence. . . . It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages.

  Carl Sagan

  Moon, Space, Civilization

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• Distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization. Dictatorships, communist countries, monarchies in the past all eventually collapsed because of their inefficiency in moving information.

  Al Gore

  Country, Moving, Past

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• The "environmental movement" is becoming an economic movement, is joining the social justice movement, is becoming a sustainability movement. It's leaving behind the "People's Needs versus Nature's Needs" conflict in favor of making the case for environmental health as the essential underpinning of prosperous and stable human civilization.

  Edward Norton

  Environmental Health, Civilization, Justice

  "Dialogues on the Environment: Q&A With Edward Norton". Interview with Mark Tercek, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 6, 2013.

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• Some people think it's naive to think we can make love our new bottom line. What I believe is naive is thinking human civilization as we know it will survive another two hundred years if we do not.

  Marianne Williamson

  Believe, Thinking, Years

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• The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

  Julian Assange

  Civilization, Tools, Internet

  "Cypherpunks: Freedom And The Future Of The Internet". Book by Julian Assange, www.theguardian.com. 2012.

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• There is a dichotomy between people who feel economic principles should order human civilization and people who believe humanitarian principles should order human civilization. That essential disagreement is underlying practically all our world drama.

  Marianne Williamson

  Drama, Believe, Order

  Source: rayhemachandra.com

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• Our carbon emissions have to eventually go to zero. We have to. Otherwise we're never going to have a stable climate and that's what our goal is for human civilization to thrive, a stable climate. We don't want one that's hotter, we don't want one that's colder, we want one that's stable.

  Katharine Hayhoe

  Zero, Civilization, Carbon Emissions

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The consensus is that climate change ranks along with nuclear warfare as the top two risks facing human civilization.

  Graciela Chichilnisky

  Civilization, Two, Risk

  "Global Warming and the Future of Humanity: An Interview With Noam Chomsky and Graciela Chichilnisk". Interview with C.J. Polychroniou, www.truth-out.org. September 17, 2016.

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• People act as if the internet will never die, that the Cloud will never die. In the face of that, much of human civilization, including our human bodies, seem so defective and mortal and constantly fading. Our lifespan is 80 years, 90 years if we're lucky, and that's a drop in the bucket compared to how long we think the internet will live.

  Virginia Heffernan

  Thinking, Long, People

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• Anyone who studies the contemporary phenomenon of global warming, or who fears the insidious impact that the smartphone is having on our lives, or who remembers that there are enough nuclear warheads on enough intercontinental ballistic missiles to destroy human civilization with some ease, understands that modern technology threatens, indeed is likely, to overwhelm us.

  David Roochnik

  Technology, Remember, Study

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• We need to shift from an economic to a humanitarian organizing principle for human civilization. And women, en masse, should be saying so.

  Marianne Williamson

  Civilization, Principles, Needs

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• We were granted the right to exist by the God of our fathers at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization nearly 4,000 years ago. For that right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of the nations.

  Menachem Begin

  Father, Blood, Years

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• If we did not take action to solve this crisis, it could indeed threaten the future of human civilization. That sounds shrill. It sounds hard to accept. I believe it's deadly accurate. But again, we can solve it.

  Al Gore

  Believe, Civilization, Sound

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