This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Billy Graham, formally William Franklin "Billy" Graham
The foundations of civilization are no stronger and no more enduring that the corporate integrity of the homes on which they rest. If the home deteriorates, civilization will crumble and fall.
Civilization | Integrity | Rest | Will |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
Civilization | Man | Size |
Dialogue, trust and collaboration rooted in humanitarian competition, a competition in self-mastery - this is the basis on which a global society can be built, a global civilization for the twenty-first century.
Civilization | Competition | Global | Self | Self-mastery | Society | Trust | Society |
Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.
A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.
Civilization | Progress |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
You cannot organize civilization around the core of militarism and at the same time expect reason to control human destinies.
Civilization | Control | Reason | Time |
Under full developed Capitalism civilization is always on the verge of revolution. We live as in a villa on Vesuvius.
Capitalism | Civilization | Revolution |
The whole record of civilization is a record of the failure of money as a higher incentive. The enormous majority of men never make any serious effort to get rich. The few who are sordid enough to do so easily become millionaires with a little luck, and astonish the others by the contrast between their riches and their stupidity... The belief in money as an incentive is founded on the observation that people will do for money what they will not do for anything else.
Belief | Civilization | Contrast | Effort | Enough | Failure | Little | Luck | Majority | Men | Money | Observation | People | Riches | Stupidity | Will | Riches | Failure |
The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.
Civilization | Little | Men | Philosophy | Time |
It is not by reason, but most often in spite of it, that area created those sentiments that are the mainsprings of all civilization – sentiments such as honor, self-sacrifice, religious faith, patriotism, and the love of glory.
Civilization | Faith | Glory | Honor | Love | Patriotism | Reason | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice |
Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
For every civilization or every period of history it is true today: show me what kind of god you have and I will tell you what kind of humanity you possess.
There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.
Civilization | Leisure |
I will... venture to assume that as the human race is continually advancing in civilization and culture as its natural purpose, so it is continually making progress for the better in relation to the moral end of its existence, and that this progress although it maybe sometimes interrupted, will never be entirely broken off or stopped.
Better | Civilization | Culture | Existence | Human race | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Will |
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 | Commitment | Confidence | Future | Imagination | Man | Nature | World | Engagement | Afraid |
A people in a state of savage independence, in which every one lives for himself, exempt, unless by fits, from any external control, is practically incapable of making any progress in civilization until it has learnt to obey. The indispensable virtue, therefore, in a government which establishes itself over a people of this sort is, that it make itself obeyed.
Civilization | Control | Government | Indispensable | People | Progress | Virtue | Virtue | Government |
No civilization professes openly to be unable to declare its destination. In an age like our own, however, there comes a time when individuals in increasing numbers unconsciously seek direction and taste despair.
Age | Civilization | Despair | Taste | Time |
At moments of crisis, where the roads to disintegration or to development separate, as on a watershed, a single decisive personality, or a small group of informed and purposeful men, may be a slight push determine the direction and movement of an otherwise uncontrollable mass of conflicting social forces… Only within the compass of the person can a total change be affected within the span of a single generation, sufficient to produce the necessary effect on civilization at large: like the seed crystal, he passes on to the whole new order of the part.
Change | Civilization | Men | Order | Personality |
Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, businessman or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.
Choice | Civilization | Life | Life |
Octavio Paz, born Octavio Paz Lozano
Our civilization has been founded on the notion of criticism: there is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science; without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.
Art | Civilization | Criticism | Freedom | Literature | Nothing | Sacred | Science | Society | Art |