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
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
—Publilius Syrus (fl.85–43 BCE) Syrian-born Roman Latin Writer
Civilization depends on morality.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
—Voltaire (1694–1778) French Philosopher, Author
The ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of the lowest.
—Charles Caleb Colton (c.1780–1832) English Clergyman, Aphorist
Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.
—Jane Addams (1860–1935) American Social Reformer, Feminist
Modern man is just ancient man… with way better electronics.
—Unknown
We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) American Head of State, Lawyer
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 has gotten further and further from the so-called ‘natural’ man, who uses all his faculties: perception, invention, improvisation.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99) American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
—Daniel Webster (1782–1852) American Statesman, Lawyer
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
In order to civilize a people, it is necessary first to fix it, and this cannot be done without inducing it to cultivate the soil.
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) French Historian, Political Scientist
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
Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
—Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British Historian
I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing:
And I said, “O years, that meet in tears,
Have ye aught that is worth the knowing?
Science enough and exploring,
Wanderers coming and going,
Matter enough for deploring,
But aught that is worth the knowing?”
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) British Poet
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
—Brian Aldiss (1925–2017) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
—Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British Sexologist, Physician, Social Reformer
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 skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, 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
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.
—Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English Mathematician, Philosopher
We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
—Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American Paleontologist, Science Writer
Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the “dragon,” in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
—John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American Naturalist
As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure
—John Dewey (1859–1952) American Philosopher, Psychologist, Educator
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.
—Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) German Chancellor, Prime Minister