1,222 Quotes About Civilization

in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.

Let us hope that the advent of a successful flying machine, now only dimly foreseen and nevertheless thought to be possible, will bring nothing but good into the world; that it shall abridge distance, make all parts of the globe accessible, bring men into closer relation with each other, advance civilization, and hasten the promised era in which there shall be nothing but peace and goodwill among all men.

We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time.

while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

Civilization is in fact the longest story of all. Civilization can persist through a series of economies.

a single generation enamoured of foreign ways is almost enough in history to risk the whole continuity of civilization and learning.

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.