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Civilization Quotes

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Oscar Wilde
8,504
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A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.

Martin Luther King Jr.
6,382
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Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos. -Will Durant
2,976
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The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

John Muir
1,147
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The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Milton Friedman
1,055
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Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few. -Amos Bronson Alcott
976
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If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

Orson Welles
300
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Civilization is hideously fragile and there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

Carrie P. Snow
297
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If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power. -Harriet Martineau
287
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Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life-blood of real civilization.

George Macaulay Trevelyan
286
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We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

John Perry Barlow
274
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New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. -David Letterman
246
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It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.

Henry Allen
244
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Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization.

Florence Nightingale
217
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The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place. -Havelock Ellis
201
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The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
197
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The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
196
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Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else. -Julian Jaynes
193
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The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.

Robert Ingersoll
188
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Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Arnold Toynbee
187
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It is impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and with 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can't read. -Newt Gingrich
183
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Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles...respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law...or, in a word justice.

Max Nordau
179
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The test of civilization is the estimate of woman. Among savages she is a slave. In the dark ages of Christianity she is a toy and a sentimental goddess. With increasing moral light, and greater liberty, and more universal justice, she begins to deve.

George William Curtis
179
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Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men. -Jane Addams
178
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Underlying the whole scheme of civilization is the confidence men have in each other, confidence in their integrity, confidence in their honesty, confidence in their future.

Bourke Cockran
144
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When a civilization takes up the study of itself, it is always high noon.

Michael Mooney
141
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The slum is the measure of civilization. -Jacob Riis
140
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Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Theodore Dreiser
109
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Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

Emile Zola
53
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America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde
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