Isaac Mayer Wise Quotes

A nation which does not make pictures, a nation which does not make statues, a nation which does not practice science, such a nation, one must admit, has no place on the highroad of civilization. But our nation with its true qualities deserves to become and will become civilized and progressive.

In a country which two hundred years ago was peopled only by savages and whose government has ... been no other than republican, it is really wonderful that there should be any polite authors at all in any line ...

We've been civilized from the beginning. In the desert, it's a baroque city like Paris or Rome.

When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.

Men in masses do not forget the main gains of their civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations, their tendency is upward.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

The progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity…. we are a much better people than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilized state.

What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the [Ancient] Greeks?

I have thought it a sufficient definition of civilization to say, it is the influence of good women.

During this period the Arab world became an intellectual center for science, philosophy, medicine and education; the Abbasids championed the cause of knowledge and established the House of Wisdom (Bait-ul-Hikmat) at Baghdad, where both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars sought to translate and gather all the world's knowledge into Arabic. The Arabs displayed a remarkable capacity of assimilating the scientific knowledge of the civilizations they had overrun. Many classic works of antiquity that might otherwise have been lost were translated into Arabic and Persian and later in turn translated into Turkish, Hebrew and Latin. During this period the Arab world was a collection of cultures which put together, synthesized and significantly advanced the knowledge gained from the ancient Roman, Chinese, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine and Phoenician civilizations.

We are a nation of innovators and problem-solvers who sparked revolutions in democratic government, civil rights, communications, flight, rural electrification and technology. We are a country defined by ideals now in need of rescue.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

One of my favourite things to think about is, if you could be invisible and go back in time, where would you go? I've always said ancient Egypt. I would love to see them building the pyramids, and I've always had a real fascination with medieval time and monarchy in medieval times.

Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.

Our saints had said that Earth existed 1.96 million years ago. Earlier, science did not accept this, but later, it had to.

We benefited from an enlightened post-war period in the United States: Our National Institutes of Health have enthusiastically and generously supported basic research.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

All that is great in man comes through work; and civilization is its product.

While it is generally agreed that the visible expressions and agencies are necessary instruments, civilization seems to depend far more fundamentally upon the moral and intellectual qualities of human beings-upon the spirit that animates mankind.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.