110 Quotes About Civilization

Jan. 16, 2025, 3:45 a.m.

110 Quotes About Civilization

In the vast tapestry of human history, civilization has been both a beacon of progress and a mirror reflecting our complex nature. It has given rise to monumental achievements, philosophical insights, and profound reflections that continue to shape our understanding of the world. As we navigate the intricacies of modern life, the wisdom captured in quotes about civilization offers timeless perspectives that inspire, challenge, and provoke thought. Whether you seek inspiration, insight, or a deeper understanding of human nature, our curated collection of 110 quotes provides a window into the enduring dialogue about what it means to be part of a civilized society. Step into this anthology of thoughts and discover the voices that have shaped our collective journey through time.

1. “There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.” - Mark Twain

2. “Our civilization will, of course, be "playing God" in an ultimate sense of the phrase: evolving a greater intelligence than currently exists on earth. It behooves us to be a considerate creator, wise to the world and its fragile nature, sensitive to the needs for stable footings that will prevent backsliding -- and keep that house of cards we call civilization from collapsing.” - William H. Calvin

3. “(When asked what he thought of Western civilization): 'I think it would be a good idea.” - Mahatma Gandhi

4. “If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.” - Robert Bringhurst

5. “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.[Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]” - Barbara Tuchman

6. “When humor goes, there goes civilization.” - Erma Bombeck

7. “In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

8. “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.” - Anais Nin

9. “[Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain?” - Frank Harris

10. “Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.” - Edward Bellamy

11. “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.” - Winston Churchill

12. “My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.” - Robert E. Howard

13. “Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” - Ayn Rand

14. “Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph” - Robert E. Howard

15. “If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?” - Virginia Woolf

16. “What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.” - theodor w. adorno

17. “The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange--all sponsored by the Church--provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.” - Thomas E. Woods Jr.

18. “Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.” - Émile Zola

19. “...But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.” - Winston Churchill

20. “I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

21. “Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman’s life…” - Arundhati Roy

22. “The smile is civilization’s finest adornment. It signifies the willpower and duty to fashion mankind’s coexistence as quietly and agreeably as possible so that it will always appear friendly. For it is all a matter of appearance. The smile is culture’s diploma: it is the diplomat’s badge.” - Iwan Goll

23. “Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one likes about the past - without having to confront the bones, potsherds, and inscriptions which tell us that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes.” - Ronald Wright

24. “Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes. The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.” - Ronald Wright

25. “Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.” - Jared Diamond

26. “Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” - G.K. Chesterton

27. “We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.” - Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

28. “This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!” - Albert Einstein

29. “Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems to be their nature.- Yes; it's a funny habit.- No, it's not funny; you are wrong there. There's nothing funny in nature, however funny it may seem to man. If dogs could reason and criticize us they'd be sure to find just as much that would be funny to them, if not far more, in the social relations of men, their masters -far more, I think. I am more convinced that there is far more foolishness among us.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

30. “All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.” - David Baldacci

31. “The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.” - Tom Robbins

32. “Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.” - James A. Michener

33. “‎Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.” - Emma Goldman

34. “[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.” - Susan Sontag

35. “Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.” - Jared Diamond

36. “Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.” - Derrick Jensen

37. “The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.” - Derrick Jensen

38. “One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog shit hotdogs, dog shit ice cream, General Tso's dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn't taste good. Or if you cling too tightly to these stories (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make this example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. Or, for that matter, substitute Big Mac, Whopper, or Coca Cola.” - Derrick Jensen

39. “This civilization is the impact of the world's consumption behavior.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

40. “Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.” - Charles Stross

41. “What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three million times is civilization.” - Mark Pesce

42. “Se não aparecerem mulheres, importam-se, que é em Portugal para tudo o recurso natural. Aqui importa-se tudo. Leis, ideias, filosofias, teorias, assuntos, estéticas, ciências, estilos, indústrias, modas, maneiras, pilhérias, tudo nos vem em caixotes pelo paquete. A civilização custa-nos caríssima, com os direitos de alfândega:e é tudo em segunda mão, não foi feita para nós, fica-nos curta nas mangas...” - Eca De Queiroz

43. “The flaw in being civilized is that it permit’s the uncivilized among us to perpetrate horrific crimes against us in the name of freedom and equality.Foreword 'RHG” - M.J. Croan

44. “Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.” - Ray Bradbury

45. “To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.” - Beryl Markham

46. “Com a mania francesa e burguesa de reduzir todas as regiões e todas as raças ao mesmo tipo de civilização, o mundo ia tornar-se numa monotonia abominável. Dentro em breve um touriste faria enormes sacrifícios, despesas sem fim, para ir a Tumbuctu - para quê? Para encontrar lá pretos de chapéu alto, a ler o Jornal dos Debates.” - José Maria Eça de Queirós

47. “Adoration is a sign of an infant civilization.” - Toba Beta

48. “Where do you. come from?" Frank challenged, puffing his chest, a little bolder now that he could breathe. "Some of us are starting to wonder.""I come from civilization," Lucius retorted. "You wouldn't be familiar with the territory. Now pick up the books.” - Beth Fantaskey

49. “No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.” - Anne Rice

50. “[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.” - Daniel Quinn

51. “You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.” - Daniel Quinn

52. “If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.” - Daniel Quinn

53. “[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.” - Daniel Quinn

54. “There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.” - Daniel Quinn

55. “This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.” - Daniel Quinn

56. “The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.” - Daniel Quinn

57. “Poets write beautiful words to describe savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.” - Toba Beta

58. “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

59. “Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid, and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease!” - W.E.B. Du Bois

60. “If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” - Henry David Thoreau

61. “The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” - Herman Melville

62. “Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.” - Richard Manning

63. “But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.” - Leo Tolstoy

64. “Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes the milder form of rivalry which is the motive force of the great portion of the serious labors of mankind.” - Holly Estil Cunningham

65. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” - Adam Smith

66. “Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune.” - adam-troy castro

67. “In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions."[Why Societies Collapse, ABC Local, July 17, 2003]” - Jared Diamond

68. “Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.” - Laura Anne Gilman

69. “The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!” - Robert E. Howard

70. “The collective consciousness of mankind defines the existence and sustainability of this civilization.” - Toba Beta

71. “Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt.” - John Derbyshire

72. “Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed.” - Iain Pears

73. “Manlius ... took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand.” - Iain Pears

74. “Politics bores you?" Bronsen said.Julien smiled. "It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven't tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all politicians are liars, fools, and tricksters, and I have as yet come across no evidence to the contrary. They can do great damage, and rarely any good. It is the job of the sensible man to try and protect civilization from their depradations.” - Iain Pears

75. “Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.” - Iain Pears

76. “When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it's not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.” - Iain Pears

77. “And here was the moment. The end of it all, for civilization was merely another name for friendship, and friendship was coming to an end.” - Iain Pears

78. “The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations - and absolutely nothing more.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

79. “If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?” - richard wright

80. “Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable ... They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring a great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don't make a scandal when they leave. (...)2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. (...)3) They respect other people's property, and therefore pay their debts.4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don't tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don't put on airs; they behave in the street as they would at home, they don't show off to impress their juniors. (...)5) They don't run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don't play on other people's heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted ... that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it's vulgar, old hat and false. (...)6) They are not vain. They don't waste time with the fake jewellery of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken [judicial orator], the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar ... They regard prases like 'I am a representative of the Press!!' -- the sort of thing one only hears from [very minor journalists] -- as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing's work they don't pass it off as if it were 100 roubles' by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don't boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren't allowed in (...) True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight ... As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one. (...)7) If they do possess talent, they value it ... They take pride in it ... they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on [others] rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits. (...)8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility ... Civilized people don't simply obey their baser instincts ... they require mens sana in corpore sano.And so on. That's what civilized people are like ... Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings.[From a letter to Nikolay Chekhov, March 1886]” - Anton Chekhov

81. “This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe” - Jimmy Carter

82. “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....” - Sigmund Freud

83. “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.” - Sigmund Freud

84. “I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.” - Kurt Vonnegut

85. “So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.” - Will Durant

86. “Car la vie est structure, lignes de force et injustice. Que fais-tu s'il est des enfants qui s'ennuient, sinon de leur imposer tes contraintes, lesquelles sont règles d'un jeu, après quoi tu les vois courrir.(chapitre XCVI)” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

87. “si tu examines mon empire tu t'en iras voir les forgerons et les trouveras forgeant des clous et se passionnant pour les clous et te chantant les cantiques de la clouterie. Puis tu t'en iras voir les bucherons et tu les trouveras abattant arbres et se passionnant pour l'abattage d'arbres, et se remplissant d'une intense jubilation à l'heure de la fête du bucheron, qui est du premier craquement, lorsque la majesté de l'arbre commence de se prosterner. Et si tu vas voir les astronaumes, tu les verras se passionnant pour les étoiles et n'écoutant plus que leur silence. Et en effet chacun s'imagine être tel. Maintenant si je te demande: "Que se passe-t-il dans mon empire, que naîtra-t-il demain chez moi?" tu me diras: "On forgera des clous, on abattra des arbres, on observera les étoiles et il y aura donc des réserves de clous, des réserves de bois et des observations d'étoiles." Car myope et le nez contre, tu n'as point reconnu la construction d'un navire.(chapitre CXVII)” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

88. “Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.” - Philip K. Dick

89. “Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.” - Henry David Thoreau

90. “They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or bomb.It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won't, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won't let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It's a miracle that it exists at all.” - Lauren Groff

91. “العقل الباحث أم العقل المتأمل.....؟ البحث إقدام إيجابي وتساؤل وشك والتماس حقيقة متجددة... التأمل نظر مجرد سلبي إلى تجليات إعجازية والدوام الأبدي.... العقل الباحث مبدع ومتجدد... العقل المتأمل تستغرقه الأبدية... والأبدية هي الماضي القديم والحاضر والمستقبل في امتداد وتجانس” - شوقي جلال

92. “The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as "humanistic" ethics, has resulted in our "cut flower culture." Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality.” - Will Herberg

93. “Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

94. “There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.” - James Robertson

95. “No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.” - Robert McKee

96. “He realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.” - G. Willow Wilson

97. “Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.” - Ayn Rand

98. “Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.” - C.L.R. James

99. “A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.” - Gustave Le Bon

100. “The old school of thought would have you believe that you'd be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn't what being in nature is all about. Rather, it's about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization—not bringing them with us.” - Ryel Kestenbaum

101. “We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.” - Anthony Marra

102. “تكون الفرد المسلم تكوناً صحيحاً منذ ابتداء الدعوة الإسلامية في مكة المكرمة، ثم كان تلاقي الأفراد عند الهجرة على ما يؤلف بينهم من العوامل المتقاربة، فبرز المجتمع الإسلامي .. ولم يكن لهذا المجتمع أول تألفه، ثقافة ولا حضارة، ثم إن الدين بأوضاعه الذهنية والخارجية، هو الذي فتح له باب الاتصال بالمعارف ليتلقاها، ويؤلف بينها، ويجدد وضعها، فتمهدت له بذلك السبيل إلى ثقافته، حتى أبرز من روائعها الخالدات، فلولا التكون الفردي المكي، والتكون الاجتماعي المدني، لما كانت آثار الحضارة التي تبدت في دمشق، أو بغداد، أو القيروان، أو قرطبة، أو سمرقند.” - محمد الفاضل بن عاشور

103. “We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not.” - Elie Wiesel

104. “What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.” - Terence McKenna

105. “Where two or more are gathered in the name of Man; that is civilization; that is Order; and that is the beginnings of brutality and suffering.” - Christopher Dutton

106. “The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.” - David Wong

107. “The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?” - Christa Wolf

108. “Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.” - Will Durant

109. “A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.” - Will Durant

110. “There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.” - Will Durant