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Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry ... The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.
WILL DURANT, The Story of Civilization
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
AYN RAND, The Fountainhead
The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.
GAO XINGJIAN, Nobel Lecture, 2000
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
H.L. MENCKEN, as quoted in James A. Haught's 2000 Years of Disbelief
Our civilization depends largely on paper.
PLINY THE ELDER, Natural History
For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
WILLA CATHER, "On the Divide," The Troll Garden
I want to take the word Christianity back to Christ himself, back to that mighty heart whose pulse seems to throb through the world to-day, that endless fountain of charity out of which I believe has come all true progress and all civilization that deserves the name .. I go back to that great Spirit which contemplated a sacrifice for the whole of humanity. That sacrifice is not one of exclusion, but of an infinite and endless and joyous inclusion. And I thank God for it.
JULIA WARD HOWE, What is Religion?
Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.
ALFRED L. KROEBER, The Superorganic
Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.
FRANK HERBERT, Children of Dune
You can't say civilization don't advance ... in every war they kill you in a new way.
WILL ROGERS, New York Times, Dec. 23, 1929
What man calls civilization always results in deserts.
DON MARQUIS, what the ants are saying in archy does his part
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