Herman Melville Quotes

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.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

A culture that holds people back should and can be changed.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference?

When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

We think we can play a small part in the evolution of culture.

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare.

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end.

Fight to preserve these traits of civilization, that made us go forward.

The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

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

Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.

It is inherent in human consciousness to improve. So there is nothing unique about a people searching for and creating ways to make their life better - all civilizations throughout history have done this. What is unique about us in America is the accelerated rate at which we continually search for novelty and progress.

But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.