Famous Quotes & Sayings

Will Durant

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Will Durant

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

Will Durant

The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

Will Durant

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

Will Durant

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

Will Durant

Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.

Will Durant

The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

Samuel P. Huntington

Civilizations evolve over time, and most scholars of civilization, including people like Carol Quigley, argue that they go through periods of warring states, and eventually evolve into a universal state.

Samuel P. Huntington

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

W. G. Sebald

Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.

W. G. Sebald

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

W. H. Auden

Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

Saul Alinsky

Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.

Roger Ebert

The purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize with other people... For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

Robert M. Hutchins

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death

William Harvey

Civilization is only a series of victories against nature.

William E. Gladstone

To serve Armenia is to serve civilization.

William E. Gladstone

The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.

Wendell Berry

Specialization is the great evil of civilization.

Wendell Berry

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Walter Mosley

All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.

Yoko Ono

We created a thing called culture and civilization, and now we're about to lose it because we're trying to destroy everything. And I kind of miss it. I miss culture and civilization.

Richard Rorty

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.

T Bone Burnett

Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.

Tom Robbins

But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

Tom Robbins

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

Tom Robbins

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

Tom Robbins

Virtually every advancement made by our species since civilization first peeked out of its nest of stone has been initiated by lone individuals, mavericks who more often than not were ignored, mocked, or viciously persecuted by society and its institutions.

Stephen Spender

The only true hope for civilization-the conviction of the individual that his inner life can affect outward events and that, whether or not he does so he is responsible for them.

Stephen Gardiner

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

Stephen Gardiner

The Industrial Revolution was another one of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.