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Civilization Quotes and Quotations
 Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.  Each new generation is a fresh invasion of savages. Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization. The human race has improved everything except the human race. A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace. There is such a thing as too much couth. We are in the first age since the dawn of civilization in which people have dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race. The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it. Let us humour if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization. So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean. We are all afraid - for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man. Civilization is just a slow process of learning to be kind. Civilization is a movement - not a condition; a voyage - not a harbour. Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles. A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay. Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery. The three great elements of modern civilization, Gunpowder, Printing, and the Protestant Religion. A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race. This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. A tablecloth restaurant is still one of the great rewards of civilization. The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother. To be a man is to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world. A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women. We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. The path of civilization is paved with tin cans. Nations, like individuals, live and die; but civilization cannot die. Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. 
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