A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.
Cities are the crucible of civilization.
But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.
Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.
Civilization is the making of civil persons.
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.
Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it'd die of remorse on the third.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.
We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
I think God's going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.
We need a government, not politics. Because there's too much politics. Of course there should be debate. But there seems to be so much pettiness and not enough good faith. It is civilized to agree to disagree, and this idea is slowly disintegrating. The great statesmen of the past knew this, and I think it helps drive civilization.
America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.
I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization.
Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.
But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.
Gorillas are almost altruistic in nature. There's very little if any 'me-itis.' When I get back to civilization, I'm always appalled by 'me, me, me.'
The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.
A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
Western civilization shapes the content of my films, provides me with subjects that haven't been used before.
A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.
Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.
The birthplace of 'Western' civilization is generally agreed to be Greece, and its birth date is generally agreed to be some time during the 6th century B.C.E. Obviously, there is not one single dramatic moment that definitively started the whole thing.
In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.
In practice, the ocean is the world's wildest place because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore.
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.
Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe.
India is a land of plenty inhibited by poverty; India has an enthralling, uplifting civilization that sparkles not only in our magnificent art, but also in the enormous creativity and humanity of our daily life in city and village.
The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.
Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.
Thus, it was to seek true civilization and true justice for all the peoples of the world, and to view this as the destruction of personal freedom and respect is to be assailed by the hatred and emotion of war, and to make hasty judgments.
