This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The great question is: can war be outlawed? If so, it would mark the greatest advance in civilization since the Sermon on the Mount." - Douglas MacArthur
"Civilization aims at making all good things... accessible even to cowards." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation's currency." - Herbert Read, fully Sir Herbert Edward Read
"In our civilization men are afraid they will not be men enough, and women are afraid they might be considered only women." - Theodor Reik
"Extremes produce reaction. Beware that our boasted civilization does not lapse into barbarism." - Antoine de Rivarol, also known as Comte de Rivarol
"As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"Evolutionism, purporting to explain all and everything solely and exclusively by natural selection for adaption and survival, is the most extreme product of the materialistic utilitarianism of the nineteenth-century. The inability of twentieth-century thought to rid itself of this imposture is a failure which may well cause the collapse of the Western civilization." -
"Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest." - Joseph Schumpeter
"The abdication of thought has been the decisive factor in the collapse of civilization." - Albert Schweitzer
"Since the beginning of civilization we have explained our existence in terms of what we could observe... Maybe we will discover that the only true reality is a state of mind, shaped by the information we can process and contexts in which we see it. Maybe the Supreme Being we call God can best be appreciated as the power of ultimate understanding. Maybe our destination has always been to learn and grow as we approach the light of ultimate understanding. Only the context of our ability to process information changes." - Frank Scully
"No international Eighteenth Amendment will get rid of war or the instruments of war until civilization finds a way for accomplishing what war has done in the past. Simply to prohibit war is not going to get rid of it. Wars must be anticipated and the causes got rid of by a readiness to accept peaceful means of settlement." - James T. Shotwell
"There is a higher form of patriotism than nationalism, and that higher form is not limited by the boundaries of one's country; but by a duty to mankind to safeguard the trust of civilization." - Oscar S. Straus, fully Oscar Solomon Straus
"The only limitless thing I know of is human want. Civilization itself is nothing more than the creation of wants, followed by methods of satisfying those wants." - James Shelby Thomas
"The white man’s civilization with its inhuman economic competition and rugged individualism has produced millions of physical and mental wrecks. It has produced enough vices to fill Dante’s hell. Nine-tenths of the people who reach forty are suffering from shattered nerves." - Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
"Civilization consists in teaching men to govern themselves." - Benjamin Ricketson Tucker
"Doubt is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization - the dim night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith that springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best." - Robert James Turnbull
"The farmers are the founders of civilization and prosperity." - Daniel Webster
"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards." - Walter Bagehot
"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterward." - Walter Bagehot
"Any development of knowledge of the rules of nature which may help to give greater command of the powers of nature holds the hope of improving the living conditions of mankind; but also holds dangers which put our entire civilization to a serious test. The responsibilities, however, that these dangers are defeated in the right way, rests not only upon the scientist but must be shared by all circles of every nation." -
"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." - R. L. Bruckberger, fully Raymond Léopold Bruckberger
"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." - Andrew Carnegie
"For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long eons of evolution, our genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future – be it one of promise or threat. Yet genetic deterioration through manmade [chemical and radioactive] agents is the menace of our time, “the last and greatest danger to our civilization.”" - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"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." - John Dewey
"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." - René Dubos, fully René Jules Dubos
"All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution." - 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." - Havelock Ellis, fully Henry Havelock Ellis
"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." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"A civilization is to be judged by its treatment of minorities." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"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." - Henry George
"The present-day global landscape is one of profound crisis, which could end either in the death of humankind or in the breakthrough to a new civilization. . . . It is up to all of us who live today on this planet." - Mikhail Gorbachev, fully Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
"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." - Os Guiness
"I believe that, for the rest of the world, contemporary America is an almost symbolic concentration of all the best and the worst of our civilization. On the one hand, there are its profound commitment to enhancing civil liberty and to maintaining the strength of its democratic institutions, and the fantastic developments in science and technology which have contributed so much to our well-being; on the other, there is the blind worship of perpetual economic growth and consumption, regardless of their destructive impact on the environment, or how subject they are to the dictates of materialism and consumerism, or how they, through the omnipresence of television and advertising, promote uniformity, and banality instead of a respect for human uniqueness." - Václav Havel
"In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"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." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Respect for man is the underlying spirit of civilization." - Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
"A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"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." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"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." - Mordecai Menaham Kaplan
"A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"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." - Harold Laski, fully Harold Joseph Laski
"We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow… the intellectual achievements of great scientists are being perverted by the material exploitation of industry and war…I have lived to experience the early results of scientific materialism… have watched pride of workmanship leave and human character decline as efficiency of production lines increased… I have seen the science I worshipped and the aircraft I loved destroying the civilization I expected them to save." -
"And neither mind nor character can be made without a spiritual element. This is just the element that has grown weak, where it has not perished, in our education, and therefore in our civilization, with disastrous results." - Richard Livingstone, fully Sir RIchard Winn Livingstone
"The next great advance in the evolution of civilization cannot take place until war is abolished." - Douglas MacArthur