Civilization

Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls,
With furniture superfluously fair,
Those stately courts, those sky-encountering walls,
Evanish all like vapours in the air.
~ Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, The Tragedie of Darius (1603).

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.
~ Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky), The Cubist Painters (1913). New Painters

Secular Society -- that is, one in which the role of theistic religion is greatly restricted in public life.
~ William Bentley Ball, Crisis Books (1995). Mere Creatures of the State? Education, Religion, and the Court

You are struck by the general scene of decay and neglect that pervades the area. Street after street of tall tenements stand empty, their shattered windows open and gaping to the sky. Broken glass lies in profusion on the streets and the unchecked running water floods into the street the engineering works, mills and factories have been closed down leaving Bridgeton with the appearance of a ghost town.
~ William Barr (of Glasgow, Scotland), Glasgwegiana (1973).

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

Man was formed for society, and is neither capable of living alone, nor has the courage to do it.
~ William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69). Introduction, sect. 2

Art degraded, Imagination denied
War govern'd the Nations.
~ William Blake, Laocoön Aphorisms (c. 1818).

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
~ William Blake, Songs of Experience (1794). London

Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion.
~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93). Proverbs of Hell

If the press is not free, if speech is not independent and untrammeled, if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen.
~ William Edgar Borah

The last struggle for our rights, the battle for our civilization, is entirely with ourselves.
~ William Wells Brown

In order to have a hierarchy, you've got to have a lowerarchy, too.
~ Bill Bruce

Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
~ William Jennings Bryan, from Speeches of William Jennings Bryan, Volume II (1909). Commerce (an address delivered at the Chicago Association of Commerce; 7 October 1908)

The salvation of the individual is also the salvation of society. Society at its best cannot live apart from the touch of the living multitude. It lives by being born again and again in the children of every generation.
~ William Lowe Bryan, Presidential Inaugural Address at Indiana University (1902). Faith in Education

They waste us -- ay -- like April snow
In the warm noon, we shrink away;
And fast they follow, as we go
Toward the setting day --
Till they shall fill the land, and we
Are driven into the Western sea.
~ William Cullen Bryant, An Indian At The Burial Place Of His Fathers (1824).

Rock and roll adolescents storm into the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face. They open zoo's, insane asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers, chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot out lighthouses, turn sewers into water supply, administer injections with bicycle pumps, they s--- on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their a-- with treaties, pacts, alliances.
~ William S. Burroughs

When 'climate change' is referred to in the press, it normally means greenhouse warming, which, it is predicted, will cause flooding, severe windstorms, and killer heat waves. But warming could also lead, paradoxically, to abrupt and drastic cooling -- a catastrophe that could threaten the end of civilization.
~ William H. Calvin, The Atlantic Monthly (January 1998). The Great Climate Flip-flop

The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life.
~ Willa Sibert Cather, Not Under Forty (1936).

All true society is the acting of one spirit on another, the communication of the activity of one soul to another.
~ William Ellery Channing (D.D.), in Dr. Channing's Note-book (1887). Society -- the State

Society must be an expression of the souls of its members.
~ William Ellery Channing (D.D.), On War. A Lecture (1838).

In unsettled times like these, when world cultures, countries and religions are facing off in violent confrontations, we could benefit from the reminder that storytelling is common to all civilizations. Whether in the form of a sprawling epic or a pointed ballad, the story is our most ancient method of making sense out of experience and of preserving the past.
~ Billy Collins, in The New York Times (11 April 2003). The Ballad of the Ballad, Poetry's Bearer of Bad News

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

Abundant evidence suggests industrial civilization must be "downsized" to curb damage to the ecosphere by the "technosphere." Trends behind this prospect include prodigious population growth, urbanization, cultural dependence upon ravenous use of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources, consequent air pollution and global climate change.
~ William R. Catton, Jr., in Environment & Society (1994). The Problem of Denial

He sees that this great roundabout
The world, with all its motley rout,
Church, army, physic, law,
Its customs and its businesses,
Is no concern at all of his,
And says -- what says he? -- Caw.
~ William Cowper, from Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782). The Jackdaw

What better thought can I urge today for your consideration than that a man owes something to the community into which he is born; that he has duties as well as rights; that his love of country, pride of liberty, respect for justice can be measured only by the service which he renders and the sacrifices which he makes for the community of which he is a part.
~ William W. (W.W.) Crapo, Speech of Presentation for the Fairhaven Town Hall (22 February 1894).

Only a few human beings should grow to the square mile; they are commonly planted too close.
~ William T. Davis

In striking at us, the terrorists sought to exploit the openness of our society, and to shake the foundations of the civilized order which America sustains. They will fail.
~ William Delahunt, U.S. House of Representatives floor debate (12 September 2001). National Grief and Pain Runs Deep

I've often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers.
~ William Orville Douglas, Remarks at the American Histadrut Cultural Exchange Institute, Harriman, NY (February 1967).

The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.
~ William Orville Douglas

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.
~ William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, Reconstruction and Africa (First published 1919).

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has first destroyed itself from within.
~ William James "Will" Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume III (1944). Caesar and Christ

Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
~ William James "Will" Durant

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
~ William James "Will" Durant

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
~ William James "Will" Durant

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.
~ William James "Will" Durant, in Life magazine (18 October 1963).

Civilization is the order and freedom promoting cultural activity.
~ William James "Will" Durant

[E]ternal vigilance is the price of civilization.
~ William James "Will" Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume I (1935). Our Oriental Heritage

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such a fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of the generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.
~ William James "Will" Durant

Our culture is superficial today, and our knowledge dangerous because we are rich in mechanisms and poor in purposes.
~ William James "Will" Durant

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism; they end with skepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
~ William James "Will" Durant

When people ask me to compare the 20th century to older civilizations, I always say the same thing: "The situation is normal."
~ William James "Will" Durant (on winning Pulitzer Prize with his wife Ariel), in The New York Times (7 May 1968).

The great depression left a mark on all of the civilized world. It was a defining moment like a giant earthquake that reminds us of how little control we have over human destiny -- despite our technology and innovation.
~ Will Eisner, in Famiglia Cristiana magazine, #38 (Interview; 23 September 2001).

New York is the greatest city in the world for lunch . . . That's the gregarious time. And when that first martini hits the liver like a silver bullet, there is a sigh of contentment that can be heard in Dubuque.
~ William Emerson, Jr., Newsweek (29 December 1975).

In the ventless room,
Over the beds at the hour of rising,
Hangs now the smother & stench of the crude flesh;
& at the grimed sink
We fill the basin of our mutual use,
Where our forty faces, rinsed daily,
Leaves each its common trace. . . .
~ William Everson (aka Brother Antoninus), Hospice Of The Word

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.
~ William Feather

When public men indulge themselves in abuse, when they deny others a fair trial, when they resort to innuendo and insinuation, to libel, scandal, and suspicion, then our democratic society is outraged, and democracy is baffled.
~ J. William Fulbright

. . . it seems our fabulous material comfort has made it all too easy to abandon the first duty of free citizens: sincere, lifelong moral and intellectual interest in this greatest of all reflections [political philosophy]. We seem more subject than ever to to mass unconcern -- or rather, to a kind of active apathy -- and hence to gross ideological manipulation.
~ William D. Gairdner, The Trouble With Democracy: A Citizen Speaks Out (March 2001).

The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
~ John William Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).

The twenty-third-century scholars understood that where human institutions were concerned, love without criticism brings stagnation, and criticism without love brings destruction. And they emphasised that the swifter the pace of change, the more lovingly men had to care for and criticize their institutions to keep them intact through the turbulent passages.
~ John William Gardner, Speech at Cornell University's one hundredth commencement (1 June 1968).

Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society.
~ William Gaylen

All the wonders of the Greek civilization heaped together are less wonderful than the single book of Psalms. Greece had all that this world could give her; but the flowers of Paradise blossomed in Palestine alone.
~ William Ewart Gladstone, Place of Ancient Greece (1865).

The resources of civilization against its enemies are not yet exhausted.
~ William Ewart Gladstone, Speech at Leeds (7 October 1881).

He was as fitted to survival in this modern world as a tapeworm in an intestine.
~ William Golding, Free Fall (1959).

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state.
~ William Golding, Address to Les Anglicistes, Lille, France. (13 February 1977). Utopias And Antiutopias

Which is better -- to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954).

Our sublimest delusion is that India is backward. This predicates, of course, that we are progressive. If backwardness and progress depend on the rate at which one can gobble up vanities perhaps India does not need our aid. . . . India's devotion to being good rather than being clever comes nearer the heart of a true civilization. Cleverness dies on the tongue like a social pleasantry, goodness echoes round the universe in an un extinguishable reality. We in the West are too busy to see that science without soul is like words without meaning.
~ William John (W.J.) Grant, The Spirit of India (1933).

Concrete is, essentially, the color of bad weather.
~ William Hamilton, Gourmet (December 1986)

I simply can't believe nice communities release effluents.
~ William Hamilton, William Hamilton's Anti-Social Register (1974 cartoon).

If the schemes of Utopians could be realized, the tone of society would be changed from what it is, into a sort of insipid high life. There could be no fine tragedies written; nor would there be any pleasure in seeing them. We tend to this conclusion already with the progress of civilization.
~ William Hazlitt, in Selected Essays of William Hazlitt (1930). Characteristics (written in 1823)

The force of the newspaper is the greatest force in civilization. . . . The newspapers control the nation because they represent the people.
~ William Randolph Hearst, Editorial in the New York Journal (25 September 1898).

We have begun to destroy the beauty of this creek. It will no longer run clear between its banks, covering with wattles and tea trees, and amongst its shallow parts overgrown with foreign looking shrubs, flags and cyress-grass. A little while, and its whole course will exhibit nothing but nakedness, and heaps of gravel and mud. We diggers are horribly destructive of the picturesque.
~ William Howitt, Land Labour and Gold: or two years on Victoria with visits to Sydney and Van Dieman's Land (1855).

I feel the "strangeness" only with regard to my fellow men, especially in towns, where they exist in conditions unnatural to me, but congenial to them. . . . In such moments we sometimes feel a kinship with, and are strangely drawn to, the dead, who were not as these; the long, long dead, the men who knew not life in towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and wind and rain.
~ William Henry ("W.H.") Hudson, Hampshire Days (1903).

The surveillance of emails, mobile phone calls, bank accounts and the launch of ID cards compromise the principles on which our civilisation stands.
~ Will Hutton, in Guardian Unlimited Observer (30 September 2001). Only liberals can be aggressive and just

Civilization is being poisoned by its own waste products.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, Quoted in the Wit and Wisdom of Dean Inge (1927).

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
~ William James, in The Atlantic Monthly (October 1880). Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment (Lecture delivered before the Harvard Natural History Society)

Whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result.
~ William Edward Hartpole (E.H.) Lecky, Quoted in What Great Men Think of Religion.

High-rises are the Pyramids of our time.
~ William Lim

I said I didn't respect religion . . . and anyone who believes in fairy tales to answer questions that we can't answer. . . . So I don't respect our religions either. But I do believe it is a clash of civilizations, absolutely, between the Islamic world and the Western world. [It] has been going on for 1,000 years.
~ Bill Maher, CNN TV "Crossfire" (28 November 2002).

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

A state of things that produces vices among low people, will produce, not opposing virtues among high people, but corresponding vices; if you weave a pattern on a piece of cloth, and then turn it over and look at the back of it, you will see the back of the pattern, and not another pattern: material riches bred by material poverty and slavery produce scorn, cynicism and despair.
~ William Morris

[S]o long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.
~ William Morris, Art Under Plutocracy (1883).

A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Every society has a tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Madness is rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1885-86). Part 4: Maxims and Interludes. Aphorism 72

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities.
~ Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy, from Music and Moonlight: Poems and Songs (1874). Ode

Civil liberty is the not being restrained by any law, but what conduces in a greater degree to the public welfare.
~ William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785). Book VI. Chapter 5: Of Civil Liberty

There's a certain amount of disorder that has to be reorganized.
~ William Samuel Paley, in the Boston Globe (16 September 1986)

The underlying principles of the present state of world culture, or civilization as it is usually and erroneously called, rest on engineering.
~ William Barclay Parsons

We have come to accept with enthusiasm the unprofessional, unappreciative, unskillful butchery of the land that goes under the name of planning.
~ William L. Pereira, in Time Magazine (25 November 1985).

Western civilization is founded upon the Bible; our ideas, our wisdom, our philosophy, our literature, our art, our ideals come more from the Bible than all other books put together. It is a revelation of divinity and of humanity.
~ William Lyon ("Billy") Phelps, Human Nature in the Bible (1922).

Well, little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me.
~ William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million (1910).

[T]he surest test of the civilization of a people -- at least, as sure as any -- afforded by mechanical art is to be found in their architecture, which presents so noble a field for the display of the grand and beautiful, and which, at the same time, is so intimately connected with the essential comforts of life.
~ William Hickling Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru (1847). Book I, Chapter V

Civilization has taught us to eat with a fork, but even now if nobody is around we use our fingers.
~ Will Rogers

There have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel and central banking.
~ Will Rogers

A good social system is not to be secured by making people unselfish, but by making their own vital impulses fit in with other people's.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell, Letter to Ottoline Morrell (8 August 1918).

No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does.
~ William Saroyan

What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
~ William Saroyan, The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills (1952).

This is the truly good news about civil society: it is not some delicate and rare flower that blossoms only when the social and economic circumstances are ideal; it is, rather, a tough, hardy perennial that springs up in the flintiest soil after fire has burnt off everything else and when circumstances seem to be the worst.
~ William Schambra, Speech, Nineteenth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures. Salisbury CT (October 1999). The Friendship Club and the Well-Springs of Civil Society

Our institutions . . . can be used to enhance and support individual growth, can be re-examined and redesigned to achieve the fullest measure of human realization. All these things are coming. None are here, but they are closer. Closer than ever before.
~ William C. ("Will") Schutz, Joy: Expanding Human Awareness (1967). Task Group Therapy

Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere.
~ William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Though authority be a stubborn bear, yet he is oft led by the nose with gold.
~ William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale. Act IV, scene iv

Are the consequences not predictable: a country of illiterate boobs sitting dumbly around the TV set, like ancient cavemen around a fire, unable to communicate or articulate, stupefied by its inanities?
~ William L. Shirer

Bureaucracies themselves should be assumed to be noxious, authoritarian parasites on society, with a tendency to augment their own size and power and to cultivate a parasitical clientele in all classes of society.
~ William E. Simon, A Time for Truth (1978).

[A] society which outwardly, indeed, appears white and glistening, but within is full of dead men's bones and rottenness.
~ W.T. (William Thomas) Stead, The Northern Echo (27 October 1871). Bishop Frazer on the Social Evil

Civilization is in peril? Put it correctly. Civilization is peril! The higher it rises, the more unstable and the more disastrous it falls. Its safety consists in increasing the peril and going on up.
~ William Laurence Sullivan, Epigrams and Criticisms in Miniature (1936).

Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.
~ William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (1918).

[I]f we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of anti-civilization.
~ William Graham Sumner

In place of the conception of the power-state we are led to that of the welfare-state.
~ William Temple (archbishop), Citizen and Churchman (1941).

The working class mother with a large family is the real heroine . . . of our civilization.
~ William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury), Speech, House of Lords (1942).

It is the tendency of the social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.
~ William Graham Sumner

Certain it is that no civilization can remain the highest if another civilization adds to the intelligence of its men the intelligence of its women.
~ William Isaac "W.I." Thomas, Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex (1907). The Mind of Woman and the Lower Races

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
~ William E. "Bill" Vaughan

It took hundreds of years for these woods to grow, and they leveled it in a week. It's gone. After they build new houses here, they'll have to widen the roads and put up gas stations, and pretty soon the whole area will just be a big strip. Eventually there won't be a nice spot left anywhere. I wonder if you can refuse to inherit the world.
~ Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

He looketh, having come
Forth of one world and witless gazed
Into another: ev'n so looked, for some
Brief while, the city -- amazed, immobile, dumb.
~ William Watson, from The Poems of William Watson (1893). A Sunset

Hospitals are corrupt. Judges are corrupt. Everybody in the world is corrupt. But our newspapers are essentially a monument to idealism.
~ Christian Williams, Newark Star Ledger (9 April 1990).

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.
~ Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973).

All civil states, with their officers of justice, in their respective constitutions and administrations, are proved essentially civil, and therefore not judges, governors, or defenders of the spiritual, or Christian, state and worship.
~ Roger Williams

We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.
~ Thomas Lanier ("Tennessee") Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). Forward

In the civilisation a new law of hostility prevails. And to call it the law of the jungle is unfair to the jungle.
~ Colin Henry Wilson

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
~ Robert Anton Wilson, Right Where You Are Sitting Now: Further Tales of the Illuminati (1982).

Everyone wants to go off with their own group, do their own thing, cut themselves off from everyone else, and cease to be accountable. Every possible sub-group now has its own inward-looking magazine and organization. I want to live in an America without ghettos or suburbs.
~ William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb The Suburbs (1994).

Society became my glittering bride,
And airy hopes my children.
~ William Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814). Book III: Despondency

It has long been recognized that the predominating temperaments of different periods of life present certain contrasts. Thus, the light, sanguine excitability of childhood, which is seldom more than superficial, is followed by the slower but more retentive temperament of youth with its frequent touch of melancholy. Then comes manhood with its mature character, generally quick and active in decision and execution, and last of all, old age with its leaning toward contemplative quiet. Even more than in the individual does this principle of antithesis find expression in the alternation of mental tendencies that appear in the social and historical life of communities, and in the reactions of these tendencies on civilization and customs and on social and political development.
~ Wilhelm Max Wundt, Outlines of Psychology (1897). V. Psychical Causality and Its Laws

Civilization is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion.
~ William Butler Yeats, from Parnell's Funeral and Other Poems (1935). Supernatural Songs, XII. Meru

For without culture or holiness, which are always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect.
~ William Butler Yeats

If we would create a great community -- and what other game is so worth the labour? -- we must recreate the old foundations of life . . .
~ William Butler Yeats, in Gods and Fighting Men (1904). Preface