This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends – the right of the laborer to this hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the right of the millionaire to his millions.
Civilization | Property | Right |
R. L. Bruckberger, fully Raymond Léopold Bruckberger
If the Day of Judgment came tomorrow, and God asked us what we had made of His revelation, of His grace and our freedom… we would be hard put to it to explain the advantages of a machine civilization whose highest efficiency is used for murder and slavery.
Civilization | Day | Efficiency | Freedom | God | Grace | Judgment | Murder | Revelation | Slavery | Tomorrow | God | Murder |
René Dubos, fully René Jules Dubos
Most of the dangerous aspects of technological civilization arise, not from its complexities, but from the fact that modern man has become more interested in the machines and industrial goods themselves than in their use to human ends.
Civilization | Ends | Machines | Man |
Havelock Ellis, fully Henry Havelock Ellis
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
Civilization | Machines | Men | Present |
Havelock Ellis, fully Henry Havelock Ellis
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
Civilization | Revolution | Time |
The things in our civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared that we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.
Civilization | Faith | Grace | Mankind | Race | Receive | Responsibility |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Ethics is… to be regarded as a therapeutic attempt – as an endeavor to achieve, by means of a command of the superego, something which has so far not been achieved by means of any other cultural activities. As we already know, the problem before us is how to get rid of the greatest hindrance to civilization – namely, the constitutional inclination of human beings to be aggressive towards one another.
Civilization | Ethics | Inclination | Means |
That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
A civilization is to be judged by its treatment of minorities.
Too much to live with, too little to live for… In our own day this question of life purpose is more urgent than ever. Three factors have converged to fuel a search for significance without precedent in human history. First, the search for the purpose of life is one of the deepest issues of our experiences as human beings. Second, the expectation that we can all live purposeful lives has been given a gigantic boost by modern society’s offer of the maximum opportunity for choice and change in all we do. Third, our fulfillment is thwarted by this stunning fact: Out of more than a score of great civilizations in human history, modern Western civilization is the very first to have a no agreed-on answer to the question of the purpose of life… Most of us in the midst of material plenty, have spiritual poverty.
Change | Choice | Civilization | Day | Expectation | Fulfillment | History | Life | Life | Little | Opportunity | Plenty | Poverty | Precedent | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Search | Society | Expectation |
To be a Jew is to affirm the world without being enslaved to it; to be a part of civilization and to go beyond it; to conquer space and to sanctify time. Judaism is the art of surpassing civilization, sanctification of time, sanctification of history.
A religion is the organized quest of a people for salvation, for helping those who live by the civilization of that people to achieve their destiny as human beings.
Civilization | Destiny | People | Religion | Salvation |
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.
Civilization | Death | Men | Plan |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched, and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to e found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old.
Harold Laski, fully Harold Joseph Laski
The surest way to bring about destruction of a civilization is to allow the abyss to widen between the values men praise and the values they permit to operate.
Civilization | Men | Praise |
The next great advance in the evolution of civilization cannot take place until war is abolished.
Civilization | Evolution | War |
We are actors in a great historical drama. It rests upon us to decide if a new era is to dawn in the transformation of the world into the kingdom of God, or if Western civilization is to descend to the graveyard of dead civilizations and God will have to try once more.
The nidus [nest] of the malady from which our civilization suffers lies in the individual soul and is only to be overcome within the individual soul.
Civilization | Individual | Soul |
Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
As for the necessity of coining new names for God, it is incomprehensible that philosophy and civilization can be enriched by ceasing to think of God as Life, Truth, Beauty, and Love, and beginning to think of Him as a blind and whirling space-time configuration dancing dizzily in an Einstein universe, plunging forward along a path of which He is ignorant, toward a goal of which He knows nothing whatever.
Beauty | Beginning | Civilization | God | Life | Life | Love | Necessity | Nothing | Philosophy | Space | Time | Truth | Universe | God | Think |