This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It was and it is to do all that can be done to eradicate an evil thing out of our civilization… a thing so incredibly wicked that it would not have been believable of modern man if it had not actually occurred. This evil, this wickedness began with intolerance and hate in a few men’s hearts. It spread until it almost wrecked the world. Now the obligation is to remember, not in hate, not in the spirit of revenge, but so that this spirit cannot ever flourish again so long as man remains on earth. And to this end, let us begin, each of us, by looking into our own hearts." - New York Times Editorial on the Holocaust NULL
"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." - Walter Rauschenbusch
"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." - Wilhelm Röepke
"The spiritual and moral perfection of the individual… is the final end of civilization." - Albert Schweitzer
"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." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
"To indoctrinate the child with the prevailing world-view of the society and class in which he has been born, to enforce conformity in later life by the thunders of the priest and by the sword of the magistrate has been “the wisdom of our ancestor” at every stage in their progress from savagery to civilization." - Preserved Smith
"Material civilization, nay, even luxury, is necessary to create work for the poor." - Vivekananda, fully Sri or Swami Vivekananda, born Narendra Nath Datta NULL
"Our whole civilization is based on a hypothetical future and the idiocy of fortune-telling." - Stephen Vizinczey, born István Vizinczey
"Given our civilization's increasing technological prowess, there's no reason to believe we can't identify a host of economically viable, bio-based alternatives to unsustainable fossil fuels and petrochemicals." - Jeffrey Hollender
"People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization." - Agnes Repplier
"The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation." - Aharon Appelfeld
"The development of human personality is the ultimate purpose of civilization." - Alexis Carrel
"In man, the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as for instance, the physiochemical equilibria of blood serum. The sepration of eh qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to triumph and man to degradation." - Alexis Carrel
"A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead
"In its broadest sense, art is civilization. For civilization is nothing other than the unremitting aim at the major perfection’s of harmony." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate sense which we term civilization. In each there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern." - Alfred North Whitehead
"A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay." - Alfred North Whitehead
"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. . . . Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead
"The resource to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals." - Alfred North Whitehead
"The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization." - Alfred North Whitehead
"We believe that the most basic of all changes in human social organization have been the result of three processes. Starting 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, agriculture was invented in the Middle East – probably by a woman. That’s the First Wave. Roughly 250 years ago, the Industrial Revolution triggered a Second Wave of change. Brute-force technologies amplified human and animal muscle power and gave rise to an urban, factory-centered way of life. Sometime after World War II, a gigantic Third Wave began transforming the planet, based on tools that amplify mind rather than muscle. The Third Wave is bigger, deeper and faster than the other two. This is the civilization of the computer, the satellite and Internet." - Alvin Toffler
"Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few." - Amos Bronson Alcott
"Our civilization… is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition in order to question it." - André Malraux
"Prejudices are the props of civilization." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"Man’s dwelling place, who could found you on reasoning, or build your walls with logic? You exist, and you exist not. You are, and are not. True, you are made out of diverse materials, but for your discovery an inventive mind was needed. Thus if a man pulled his house to pieces, with the design of understanding it, all he would have before him would be heaps of bricks and stones and tiles. he would not be able to discover therein the silence, the shadows and the privacy they bestowed. Nor would he see what service this mass of bricks, stones and tiles could render him, now that they lacked the heart and soul of the architect, the inventive mind which dominated them. For in mere stone the heart and soul of man have no place. But since reasoning can deal with only such material things as bricks and stones and tiles, and there is no reasoning about the heart and soul that dominate them and thus transform them into silence - inasmuch as the heart and soul have no concern with the rules of logic or the science of numbers - this is where I step in and impose my will. I, the architect; I, who have a heart and soul; I, who wield the power of transforming stone into silence. I step in and mold that clay, which is the raw material, into the likeness of the creative vision that comes to me from God; and not through any faculty of reason. Thus, taken solely by the savor it will have, I build my civilization; as poets build their poems, bending phrases to their will and changing words, without being called upon to justify the phrasing of the changes, but taken solely by the savor these will have, vouched by their hearts." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Neither race nor environment, taken by itself, can be the positive factor which, within the last six thousand years, has shaken humanity out of its static repose on the level of primitive society and started it on the hazardous quest of civilization." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Civilization is a movement, not a condition. A voyage and not a harbor." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"We are in the first age since the dawn of civilization in which people have dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Western Civilization stands not for technology, but the sacredness of the individual human personality." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"I’m convinced that time has no existence in the mind at all. We partition time out of necessity, so that if I say I will be somewhere at 1 o’clock, we agree on what 1 o’clock is. Civilization couldn’t function otherwise. But our minds are a swirling mass of images and recollections that are connected, and it’s the connections that count." - Arthur Asher Miller
"Man is at bottom a wild and terrible animal. We know him only as what we call civilization has tamed and trained him; hence we are alarmed by the occasional breaking out of his true nature. But whenever the locks and chains of law and order are cast off, and anarchy comes in, he shows himself for what he really is." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Civilization is a slow process of adopting the ideas of minorities." - Author Unknown NULL
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of the tribe." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Religion is civilization, the highest." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"Life is so mysterious. People are in misery, and they don’t know how to get out, get help or free themselves. Life is total freedom, but we’re trapped in our own civilization, culture, religion, teachings. We’re equipped with fear, ignorance, unhappiness. Desire is the big evil, the big temptation. Many people carry on in life without knowing this. We do so much for our bodies but not for our souls. Pay attention to yourself, monitor your thinking and capture the villains within. Know what it is in you that would make people suffer more, make people suffer less. Know this and you know how to use your thinking and abilities to bring peace. Certain people have certain duties, a talent. The meaning of life is to see this mission, fulfill it and make the maximum use of your life and your benefit and mankind’s." - Bernie S. Siegel
"Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell