"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
— Albert Camus

"There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he less savage than the other savages."
— Mark Twain

"(Asked what he thought of Western civilization) 'I think it would be a good idea.'"
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."
— Anaïs Nin

"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, 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."
— Barbara W. Tuchman

"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

"When humor goes, there goes civilization."
— Erma Bombeck

"Civilization is vastly overrated."
— Patricia Briggs (On the Prowl (Includes: Alpha & Omega Prequel; World of the Lupi, #3.5; Dorina Basarab Prequel; Monère, #3))

""I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me...""
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it."
— Wendell Berry

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."
— Émile Zola

"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

"Civilization is a race between disaster and education."
— H.G. Wells

"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, 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. "
— Barbara W. Tuchman

"I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."
— Freeman Dyson (Infinite in All Directions)

"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one."
— Rousseau

"But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty."
— Michel Foucault

"Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"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 (The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning)

"We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs."
— Eric Berne

"[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 (Oscar Wilde)

"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 (Looking Backward: 2000-1887)

"All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another’s presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best."
— O. Henry

"All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best"
— O. Henry

"I say that almost everywhere there is beauty enough to fill a person's life if one would only be sensitive to it. but Henry says No: that broken beauty is only a torment, that one must have a whole beauty with man living in relation to it to have a rich civilization and art. . . . Is it because I am a woman that I accept what crumbs I may have, accept the hot-dog stands and amusement parks if I must, if the blue is bright beyond them and the sunset flushes the breasts of sea birds?"
— Elizabeth Coatsworth (Personal Geography: Almost and Autobiography)

"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

"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 (How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now)

"The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society."
— Mark Skousen

"The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."
— Sigmund Freud

"Father Nicholas Steno, is often identified as the father of geology."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"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

"Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science.'"
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure."
— Charles Fourier

"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.

"I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost."
— John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids)

"The university system, a gift of Western civilization to the world, was developed by the Catholic Church."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm."
— Matthew Stover (Star Wars: Shatterpoint)

"The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable.
"
— Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity)

"The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European poeples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable."
— Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity)