Top 1200 Human Civilization Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.

All human endeavor, all human civilization, is the act of solving collective action problems. Should we put out our own fires, or should we have a fire department? Should we build roads, or should we hack our way through the woods from one factory to another?

To me, the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event in modern civilization.

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

We represent the only efficient moral, intellectual and political force capable of saving human civilization.

When all material advancements utilized in spiritual need that is the real advancement of human civilization.

Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that's why they can say they're so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!

There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation of a world government.

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

To us the family is the cornerstone of civilization and must ever be. It is the foundation of proper human relationships.

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting.

Japan today has become acquainted with the Western civilization of the rule of Might, but retains the characteristics of the Oriental civilization of the rule of Right. Now the question remains whether Japan will be the hawk of the Western civilization of the rule of Might, or the tower of strength of the Orient.

If human civilization is going to invade the waters of the earth, then let it be first of all to carry a message of respect.

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.

Every civilization: Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, all of them understood that LEARNING was to make a BETTER HUMAN BEING, LEARNING was NOT to MAKE MORE MONEY; It was to make a BETTER HUMAN BEING.

The transnational corporations and the money markets have declared the era of human-designed regulations over. Now the market must reign. Because few people in the business community are paid to think about phrases such as "Western civilization," they don't seem to realize that they are proposing the arbitrary denial of 2,500 years of human experience.

Allen's Law of Civilization: It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.

New approaches are needed, new orientations in both thought and action. We must make the transition to a new civilization...We are talking of a transition toward a new civilization. No one knows what it will be like. What is important is to orient in that direction... I am convinced that a new civilization will inevitably take on certain features that are characteristic of, or inherent in, the socialist ideal.

It is only through books that we partake of the great harvest that is human civilization across the ages.

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.

For years, I referred to climate change as an 'existential' threat to human civilization, and called it a 'crisis.'

The real triumph of civilization is the extent to which coercion is banished from human relations.

Civilization is not necessary before Christianity; do both together if you will, but you will find civilization follow Christianity more easily than Christianity follow civilization.

If we have an element of Americans here that reject western civilization, and that's a big element, that reject western civilization, then what have we? This is an effort on the left I think to break down the American civilization and the American culture and turn it into something entirely different.

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individual.

Liberty built civilization. It can rebuild civilization.

The greatest advances in human civilization have come when we recovered what we had lost: when we learned the lessons of history.

War is a damnable, filthy thing and has destroyed civilization after civilization

My book had a universal theme. It's not a "racial" novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.

The cash register did more for human morality than the Congregational Church. It was a really powerful phenomenon to make an economic system work better, just as, in reverse, a system that can be easily defrauded ruins a civilization. A system that's very hard to defraud, like a cash register, helped the economic performance of a civilization by reducing vice, but very few people within economics talk about it in those terms.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species.

Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact

It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization.

We need to shift from an economic to a humanitarian organizing principle for human civilization. And women, en masse, should be saying so.

The transaction between writer and reader is human civilization's most dazzling feat, yet it's such a part of our lives that it's, well, prosaic.

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

I believe, 50 years from now, when you write history, one technology that would have changed human civilization is going to be the mobile Internet.

It has been the White Race who has been the world builder, the maker of cities and commerce and continents. It is the White Man who is the sole builder of civilizations. It was he who build the Egyptian civilization, the great unsurpassed Roman civilization, the Greek civilization of beauty and culture, and who, after having been dealt a serious blow by a new Semitic religion, wallowed through the Dark Ages, finally extricated himself, and then build the great European civilization.

It is generally admitted that the cultural values (humanization) and the existing institutions and policies of society are rarely,if ever, in harmony. This opinion has found expression in the distinction between culture and civilization, according to which "culture" refers to some higher dimension of human autonomy and fulfillment, while "civilization" designates the realm of necessity, of socially necessary work and behavior, where man is not really himself and in his own element but is subject to heteronomy, to external conditions and needs.

Civilization may progress, human nature will remain the same throughout all ages.

When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization - any kind of civilization - disappears.

The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. They can persuade and can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better and the worse. Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however, unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilization there is always an element of unrest.

You cannot organize civilization around the core of militarism and at the same time expect reason to control human destinies.

In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.

I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.

Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.

For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.

We're headed for what is called Type 1 Civilization, planetary civilization. Type 2 would be stellar civilization, like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization would be galactic, like Star Wars. We are Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But the question is: Will we make it? Will we make the transition from Type 0 to Type 1? It's not clear.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.

The consensus is that climate change ranks along with nuclear warfare as the top two risks facing human civilization.