Ancestor Quote by Roger Scruton

“It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....”

— Sigmund Freud

“Civilization is refinement of spirit, respect of one's neighbor, tolerance of foreign opinion, courtesy of manner.”

— Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

“What history gives us leaves upon us, on the contrary, the impression of decadence rather than of an advancing civilization.”

— Herman Bavinck

“For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we…

— Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

“Even if we're among the lucky few who benefit from civilization, we find ourselves curiously unsatisfied, plagued by stress, worry, and conflict... Like the…

— Michael Carter

“The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no…

— George Orwell

“Contrary to nature’s rule of “survival of the fittest,” we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.”

— Philip Yancey

“Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart. And civilization doesn't just happen; we have to make it…

— Bill Moyers

“Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“If history has taught me anything about the nature of others, it has thought me that when natures can not be denied, they persist.”

— Dew Platt

“In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward…

— Richard Rohr

“The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no…

— George Orwell