This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other's throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. we will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known
Civilization | Human race | Race | Will |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The metaphysical comfort - with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us - that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable - this comfort appears in the incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural being who live ineradicably, as it were behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations.
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.
Civilization | Intelligence | Mind | Progress | Wealth |
In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane… It refers to the attainment of both material well-being and the elevation of the human spirit, [but] since what produces man’s well-being and refinement is knowledge and virtue, civilization ultimately means the progress of man’s knowledge and virtue.
Attainment | Civilization | Comfort | Cultivation | Knowledge | Life | Life | Means | Progress | Refinement | Virtue | Virtue |
Now this problem of the adjustment of man to his natural resources, and the problem of how such things as industrialization and urbanization can be accepted without destroying the traditional values of a civilization and corrupting the inner vitality of its life — these things are not only the problems of America; they are the problems of men everywhere.
There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced.
Civilization | Contempt | Study | Will | World |
All the civilization we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy.
Civilization | People | Power |
Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.
Civilization | Conquest | Existence | Nations | Power | War |
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.
Civilization | Society | Society |
The whole edifice of Indian civilization is imbued with spiritual meaning. The close interdependence and perfect harmonization of the two serve to counteract the natural tendency of Indian philosophy to become recondite and esoteric, removed from life and the task of the education of society. In the Hindu world, the folklore and popular mythology carry the truths and teachings of the philosophers to the masses. In this symbolic form the ideas do not have to be watered down to be popularized. The vivid, perfectly appropriate pictorial script preserves the doctrines without the slightest damage to their sense.
Civilization | Education | Ideas | Life | Life | Philosophy | Truths |
Havelock Ellis, fully Henry Havelock Ellis
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.
Civilization | Wealth |
More is given to us than to any people at any time before; and, therefore, more is required of us. We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit. Failing these, civilization must pass into destruction. It cannot be maintained on the ethics of savagery. For civilization knits men more and more closely together, and constantly tends to subordinate the individual to the whole, and to make more and more important social conditions.
Civilization | Ethics | Important | Individual | Men | People | Public | Sense | Time |
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
The Earth faces environmental problems right now that threaten the imminent destruction of civilization and the end of the planet as a livable world. Humanity cannot afford to waste its financial and emotional resources on endless, meaningless quarrels between each group and all others. there must be a sense of globalism in which the world unites to solve the real problems that face all groups alike.
Civilization | Earth | Humanity | Problems | Right | Sense | Waste | World |
Henry Beston, born Henry Beston Sheahan
Our civilization has fallen out of touch with night. With lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?
Beauty | Civilization | Fear | Little | Mystery | Will | Beauty | Afraid |
Every civilization rests on a set of promises. . . . If the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.
Civilization | Faith | Hope |
Jacob Burckhardt, fully Carl Jacob (or Jakob) Christoph Burckhardt
To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions
Civilization | Present | Receive | Work |
Jacques Barzun, fully Jacques Martin Barzun
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves.
Civilization | Consequences | Indispensable | Property | Rights |
We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about - farming replacing hunting.