Quotes about Civilization

It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm, reasonable by courtesy only, shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization, taken somewhere, to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence.

I feel sure we are the great coming nation—yet—and she sighed—I feel my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns—

A delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free.

He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street—and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art—and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.

Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.

Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.

When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, "It would be nice."

A cat is an example of sophistication minus civilization.

Our civilization, such as it is, was shaped by religion, and the men who aspire to public office anyplace in the free world must make obeisance to God or risk immediate opprobrium.

The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.

Are we a troop together or a band of savages?