This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"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." - Billy Graham, formally William Franklin "Billy" Graham
"The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization. And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth." -
"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." - Daisaku Ikeda
"Man started out as a "weak thing of the world" and evolved "to confound the things that are mighty." And within the human species, too, the weak often develop aptitudes and devises which enable them not only to survive but to prevail over the strong. Indeed, the formidableness of the human species stems from the survival of its weak. Were it not for the compassion that moves us to care for the sick, the crippled, and the old there would probably would have been neither culture or civilization. The crippled warrior who had to stay behind while the manhood of the tribe went out to war was the storyteller, teacher, and artisan. The old and the sick had a hand in the development of the arts of healing and of cooking. One thinks of the venerable sage, the unhinged medicine man, the epileptic prophet, the blind bard, and the witty hunchback and dwarf." - Eric Hoffer
"There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization." - Felix Adler
"A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress." - Francis Bacon
"Art and religion are the soul of our civilization. Go to them, for there love exists and endures." - 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." - Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
"You cannot organize civilization around the core of militarism and at the same time expect reason to control human destinies." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
"Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head." - George Bernard Shaw
"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." - George Bernard Shaw
"Beauty, purity, respectability, religion, morality, art, patriotism, bravery and the rest… are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and enslaved. This is the family secret of the governing class." - George Bernard Shaw
"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." - George Bernard Shaw
"Under full developed Capitalism civilization is always on the verge of revolution. We live as in a villa on Vesuvius." - George Bernard Shaw
"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." - Gustave Le Bon
"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." - Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
"The imagination is the secret and harrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith." - Henry Ward Beecher
"There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity." - Herbert Spencer
"Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. But if you know some history you know that's not true." - Howard Zinn
"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." - Immanuel Kant
"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." - Jacob Bronowski
"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." - John Stuart Mill
"Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort." - José Ortega y Gasset
"Anti-Semitism in any form is a barbaric insult to our culture and our civilization, which have been moulded by Christianity, and as a breakdown of Christian values, which have become confused and lacking in humanity." - Karl Barth
"Man's chief purpose... is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life." - Lewis Mumford
"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." - Lewis Mumford
"Civilization begins by a magnificent materialization of human purpose; it ends in a purposeless materialism. An empty triumph, which revolts even the self that created it." - Lewis Mumford
"Man’s chief purpose… is the creation and preservation of value; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately to the individual and human life." - Lewis Mumford
"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." - Loren Eiseley
"I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization." - Luther Standing Bear, aka Ota Kte or Mochunozhin
"As a field, however fertile, cannot be fruitful without civilization, neither can a mind without learning." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"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." - Margaret Mead
"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." - Octavio Paz, born Octavio Paz Lozano
"When a nation makes progress in science, technology, economic life, and the prosperity of its citizens, a great contribution is made to civilization. But all should realize that these things are not the highest good, but only instruments for pursuing such goods." - Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli NULL
"The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should takes these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love or power in the people, lest civilization should be undone." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence. It invites to the noblest solitude and to the noblest society." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The true test of civilization is, not the census, not the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"War is on its last legs; and a universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism, of liberal governments over feudal forms. The question for us is only how soon?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influences of character is in its infancy." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The final test of religious faith... is whether it will enable men to endure insecurity without complacency or despair, whether it can so interpret the ancient verities that they will not become mere escape hatches from responsibilities but instruments of insights into what civilization means." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"There has never been a time when civilization stood more in need of individuals who are genuinely culture conscious, who can see objectively the social behaviors of other peoples without fear and recrimination." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"War in our own civilization is as good an illustration as one can take of the destructive lengths to which the development of a culturally selected trait may go. If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"Tolerance is the only real test of civilization." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps