This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If men can ever learn to accept their truths as not final, and if they an ever learn to build on something better than dogma, they may not be found saying, discouragedly, every once in so often, that every civilization carries in it the seeds of decay.
Better | Character | Civilization | Dogma | Men | Learn | Truths |
Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.
Barbarism | Character | Civilization |
The contradiction between what is requested of man and what can be offered to him has become so striking, the ideology so thin, the discontents in civilization so great that they must be compensated through annihilation of those who do not conform, political enemies, Jews, asocial persons, the insane. The new order of fascism is reason revealing itself as unreason.
Character | Civilization | Contradiction | Man | Order | Reason |
Intelligence is kindness. Kindness is intelligence. The fundamental, which the two terms suggest in different ways... is the same quality on which all human civilization is built.
Character | Civilization | Intelligence | Kindness |
Cynics build no bridges; they make no discoveries; no gaps are spanned by them. Cynics may pride themselves in being realistic in their approach, but progress and the onward march of Christian civilization demand an inspiration and motivation that cynicism never affords. If we want progress we must take the forward look.
Character | Civilization | Cynicism | Inspiration | Pride | Progress |
Wherever there is lost the consciousness that every man is an object of concern for us just because he is a man, civilization and morals are shaken, and the advance to fully developed inhumanity is only a question of time.
Character | Civilization | Consciousness | Inhumanity | Man | Object | Question | Time |
Every civilization rests on a set of promises... If the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.
Civilization | Faith | Hope | Wisdom |
Henry Christopher "H.C." Bailey
The origin of civilization is man's determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.
Civilization | Determination | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |
Unless there is a recovery of the true dualism or, what amounts to the same thing, a reaffirmation of the truths of the inner life in some form - traditional or critical, religious or humanistic - civilization in any sense that has been attached to that term hitherto is threatened at its base.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
If civilization has profoundly modified man, it is by accumulating in his social surroundings, as in a reservoir, the habits and knowledge which society pours into the individual at each new generation. Scratch the surface, abolish everything we owe to an education which is perpetual and unceasing, and you find in the depth of our nature primitive humanity, or something very near it.
Civilization | Education | Humanity | Individual | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Society | Wisdom | Society |