Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.

World history is the history of the great cultures.

Protestant Christianity ... tutored the first generations of Americans. It provided what we today would call the value system of the society.

A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.

In order to rule the world, our wise forefathers created civilization based on ritual, moral values, and education.

Civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence - whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.

The story of man is the history, first, of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within that system of necessary restraints.

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.

A nation may be ever so civilized and yet lack wisdom.

The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.

I believe that Western civilization, after some disgusting glitches, has become almost civilized. I believe it is our first duty to protect that civilization. I believe it is our second duty to improve it. I believe it is our third duty to extend it if we can.

Traditional marriage in the platform is the essential building block to our civilization.

Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance ... It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests ... Christianity ... is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.

It's called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.

A legacy that powerful does not disappear. Next to the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans were babies. Our modern nations like Great Britain and America? Blinks of an eye...The very oldest root of civilization, at least of Western civilization, is Egypt. Look at the pyramid on the dollar bill. Look at the Washington Monument—the world’s largest Egyptian obelisk. Egypt is still.......very much alive.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.