52 Metaphors for civilization

The English and the French, too, believe their civilization to be the best in the world.

While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions.

Whether the present civilization of Spain is an advance upon that of the Moors might in many respects become a matter of much doubt.

Western civilization is an incomplete experiment.

It must be borne in mind that the civilization they brought with them was a growth from Teutonic ancestry,an evolution from Saxon times, although it is difficult to trace the successive developments during the Norman rule.

For him, civilization is "the sum of things in which the heritage of the child of the twentieth century is better than that of the child of the Stone Age.

Civilization is the most comprehensive, extensive and inclusive life pattern achieved by terrestrial humanity.

Roman civilization under the Caesars was a centralized absolutism with a large measure of peripheral deviation and autonomy.

Higher civilization and the correspondingly greater power are the foundations of the right to annexation.

A civilization is a cluster of peoples, nations and empires so related in time and space that they share certain ideas, practices, institutions and means of procedure and survival.

In Part III, Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete, I have tried to check our thinking about civilization with the sweep of present day historical trends.

Partial civilization has been a blight to their national life.

It is certain that civilization is a check to fruitfulness, so that one may picture a series of social evolutions conducing now to decrease and now to increase of population, the whole ending in final equilibrium, by the very effect of culture's victory when the world shall be entirely populated and civilized.

Barbarism is a one-story log-hut, a poor thing, but better than nothing; while such a civilization would be simply a second story, with a first story too weak to sustain it, a magnificent sky-parlor, with all heaven in view from the upper windows, but with the whole family coming down in a crash presently, through a fatal neglect of the basement.

Civilization is not a thing separate and apart, any more than art is.

" I said over for him what Rui had written: I love the Polynesian; this civilization of ours is a dingy, ungentlemanly business; it drops out too much of man, and too much of that the very beauty of the poor beast ...

Civilization is a level of culture built upon foundations laid down through long periods of pre-civilized living.

Civilization is an evolution.

The old civilization was a dismal mockery of the aspirations of man.

As an economist I was inclined to put economics first, but since the study centered on civilization, and since all known civilizations were not groupings of economic subdivisions but aggregates of nations, empires and their dependencies, and since the expansion of civilization has consisted in enlarging the geographical area of the civilization in question, I decided to begin with politics.

Civilization is not an example of perpetual motion.

Sir, your New-World civilization is barbarism.

Civilization is largely a question of new machinery and methods.

Despite its apparent massiveness, Roman civilization was not a monolith.

And civilization, in the highest possible meaning of that most expressive word, is that great and final and all-embosoming harbor toward which all these achievements and changes dimly, but directly, point.

52 Metaphors for  civilization