Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Speech is civilization itself

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact – it is silence which isolates.

War! It is purification, liberation, an enormous hope … The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay, a wonder: a victory of the soul over numbers … The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace the element, of civil corruption?

The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor … If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please.

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life… its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.

Civilization is the lamb’s skin in which barbarism masquerades

The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both

If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines

There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.

Civilization depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their interests and corrupted by their prejudices.

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.

They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization.

I know something about the civilization of China, with my background, obviously, and I think I know something about American history. But that’s about all. And I’ve traveled all over the world, and for a long time I didn’t know very much about it, really.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

My songs are a mix of my own weird raised-by-wolves perspective and civilization.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization – including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain – without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism

If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy… to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous… let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb

Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.

I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government–but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops.

It is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.

Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.

[Lorraine Hansberry] was very worried about a civilization which could produce those five policeman standing on the Negro woman’s neck. In Birmingham, or wherever it was. And I am too. I’m terrified At the moral apathy. The death of the heart. Which is happening in my country.

The origin of civilization is man’s determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.

Hate-on-the-highway is an institution occupying a high place in our modern civilization….The godawful glares that drivers exchange as they pass each other, the mutual hatred between motorist and pedestrian, these manifestations seem to constitute the ultimate in righteous wrath.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

I write what I like to write. Those who like to listen to it, listen to it. And the ones who don’t, watch football and drink beer, jog, go to discos and so forth. I never claimed to be a man for all season

A decadent civilization compromises with its disinfecease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.

Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.

Enlarged sympathy with children was one of the chief contributions made by the Victorian English to real civilization.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves.

Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological, and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilization. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralyzed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing

Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold.

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

Civilization and profit go hand in hand

Go to work! Go to work in the morn of a new creation until you have reached the height of self-progress, and from that pinnacle bestow upon the world a civilization of your own.

Any government that chooses to be an ally of terror has also chosen to be an enemy of civilization.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, ‘We’re sorry we did it,’ that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it’s just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, ‘We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.’ Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

The results of science, in the form of mechanism, poison gas, and the yellow press, bid fair to lead to the total downfall of our civilization.

The practical dreamers have always been, and always will be, the pattern-makers of civilization

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war

We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people – a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer

The greatest proof of our civilization is our distrust of it.