Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations on Civilization

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) British Head of State

The word “civilization” to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don’t believe in the golden ages, you see… civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.
Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
Brian Aldiss (1925–2017) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer

The old Hindoo saw, in his dream, the human race led out to its various fortunes.—First, men were in chains, that went back to an iron hand—then he saw them led by threads from the brain, which went upward to an unseen hand. The first was despotism, iron, and ruling by force.—The last was civilization, ruling by ideas.
Wendell Phillips (1811–84) American Abolitionist, Lawyer, Orator

Civilization depends on morality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.
Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970) American Writer, Critic, Naturalist

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) Russian Novelist, Essayist, Writer

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
William C. Durant (1861–1947) American Industrialist

Civilization… wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.
Richard Bach (b.1936) American Novelist, Aviator

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 Feynman (1918–88) American Physicist

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist

Man was not intended by nature to live in communities and be civilized.
Epicurus (c.341–270 BCE) Greek Philosopher

Civilization is the order and freedom promoting cultural activity.
William C. Durant (1861–1947) American Industrialist

Here is the element or power of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, and of social life and manners, and all needful to build up a complete human life.—We have instincts responding to them all, and requiring them all, and we are perfectly civilized only when all these instincts of our nature—all these elements in our civilization have been adequately recognized and satisfied.
Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic

Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.
Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher

Civilization is the making of civil persons.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.
Anatole France (1844–1924) French Novelist

A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900–44) French Novelist, Aviator

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Satirist

It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) Scottish Novelist

Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright

The central question is whether the wonderfully diverse and gifted assemblage of human beings on this earth really knows how to run a civilization.
Adlai Stevenson (1900–65) American Diplomat, Politician, Orator

The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.
Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American Writer, Publisher, Artist, Philosopher

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American Science-fiction Writer

You can’t say civilization isn’t advancing: in every war, they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers (1879–1935) American Actor, Rancher, Humorist

If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.
Victor Hugo (1802–85) French Novelist

Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist

Civilization is what makes you sick.
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist Painter

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *