Quotes about Civilization

I believe that George Washington knew the City of Man cannot survive without the City of God; that the Visible City will perish without the Invisible City.

The most base of men can be civilized through suffering.

We would never allow child sacrifice, which is one of the sure manifestations of a totally reprobate civilization. Really?

The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful.

One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always a danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fiber. The

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue--the penalty of living in an old civilisation with a notebook.

Is it the lot of average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization?

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured

Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched,than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing do with laws but to obey them, and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation. -Agrarian Justice