This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.
Civilization | Hurry |
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
Our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities.—The price we pay for our civilization is the fine yet impassible differentiation of these.
Civilization | Life | Life | Manners | Price |
To be a Jew is to affirm the world without being enslaved by 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. Civilization is on trial. Its future will depend upon how much of the Sabbath will penetrate its spirit.
Art | Civilization | Future | Sabbath | Space | Will | World | Art |
As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.
Civilization | Mankind | Sense | Will | Wonder |
Joost Meerloo. fully Joost Abraham Maurits Meerlo
If men can be made to understand that society, with its rigid codes and stratifications, is in its confused infancy rather than in the apex of its development; if they can be made to understand that the conflicts and contradictions of society can only be resolved by scientific long-range planning-then we will succeed in maintaining what civilization we have and drive onward to greater culture.
Civilization | Infancy | Men | Society | Will | Society | Understand |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
Civilization | Government | Self | World | Government |
We have invented exercise, recreation, pleasure, amusement,and the rest. But recreation, pleasure, amusement, fun and all the rest are poor substitutes for joy; and joy, I am convinced, has its roots in something from which civilization tends to cut us off. Some awareness of the world outside of man must exist if one is to experience the happiness and solace which some of us find in an awareness of nature and in our love for her manifestations.
Awareness | Civilization | Experience | Fun | Love | Man | Nature | Rest | World | Awareness | Happiness |
Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.z1b3Ae0CfN
Civilization | Earth |
We must be part not only of the human community, but of the whole community; we must acknowledge some sort of oneness not only with our neighbors, our countrymen and our civilization but also some respect for the natural as well as for the man-made community. Ours is not only 'one world' in the sense usually implied by that term. It is also 'one earth'. Without some acknowledgement of that fact, men can no more live successfully than they can if they refuse to admit the political and economic interdependency of the various sections of the civilized world. It is not a sentimental but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.
This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.
Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism.
Civilization | Corruption | Crime | Extreme | Good | Order | Virtue | Virtue |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Love is rarely a hypocrite; but hate - how detect and how guard against it! It lurks where you least expect it; it is created by causes that you can the least foresee; and civilization multiplies its varieties, whilst it favors its disguise.
Civilization | Hate |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
No people ever did or ever can attain a worthy civilization by the satisfaction merely of material needs.
Civilization | People |
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.
Age | Civilization | Freedom | History | Liberty |
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
If the small minority of enlightened citizens who are able to conceive sound principles of political management do not succeed in winning the support of their fellow citizens and converting them to the endorsement of policies that bring and preserve prosperity, the cause of mankind and civilization is hopeless. There is no other means to safeguard a propitious development of human affairs than to make the masses of inferior people adopt the ideas of the elite. This has to be achieved by convincing them. It cannot be accomplished by a despotic regime that instead of enlightening the masses beats them into submission. In the long run the ideas of the majority, however detrimental they may be, will carry on. The future of mankind depends on the ability of the elite to influence public opinion in the right direction.
Ability | Cause | Civilization | Future | Ideas | Influence | Mankind | Means | Opinion | People | Principles | Public | Right | Sound | Will | Winning |
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years. To interpret history from this viewpoint is historical materialism; standing in opposition to this viewpoint is historical idealism.
Civilization | History | Opposition |
Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?
Civilization | Man |
While it is generally agreed that the visible expressions and agencies are necessary instruments, civilization seems to depend far more fundamentally upon the moral and intellectual qualities of human beings -- upon the spirit that animates mankind.
Civilization | Qualities | Spirit |
A civilization built on dualism and war within and between persons, one that puts its most creative minds and its best engineers to sadistic work building more and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at all. It needs a radical transformation from the heart outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just as in the last century it outlawed slavery. The human race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows it yet.
Civilization | Heart | Human race | Race | War | Work |