Quotes about Civilization

Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.

Free speech is not just another value. It's the foundation of Western civilization.

Christianity is the very root and foundation of Western civilization.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

Mythology -and therefore civilization- is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels.

A sufficient and sure method of civilization is in the influence of good women.

They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilization.

I question the value of our civilization when I see that our public representatives have lost hold of the simplest, strongest truths. Nothing demonstrates the emptiness of a person's mind more than putting party loyalty above principle.

The truest test of civilization is not the census, size of cities, or crops; but the kind of man the country turns out.

there has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even disdain for those ritual forms that once brought forth, and up to now have sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilization. There is a ridiculous nature-boy sentimentalism that with increasing force is taking over. Its beginnings date back to the eighteenth century of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with its artificial back-to-nature movements and conceptions of the Noble Savage.

Liberty--liberty within the law--and civilization are inseparable, and though both were threatened we find them now secure; and there comes to Americans the profound assurance that our representative government is the highest expression and surest guaranty of both.

Apart from the museums that anchor the great cities of Europe and America, the Roman Catholic Church is what remains of "Christendom," the generating aesthetic and intellectual tradition of Western civilization.