If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.
Albert Einstein

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
Mark Twain

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
Winston Churchill

Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
Vince Lombardi

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.
Mohandas Gandhi

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.
Bill Cosby

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

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.
Helen Keller

I think God's going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.
Steven Wright

You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.
Will Rogers

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

When humor goes, there goes civilization.
Erma Bombeck

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
Henry David Thoreau

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Oscar Wilde

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Sigmund Freud