James Russell Lowell Quotes

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development.

In externals we advance with lightening express speed, in modes of thought and sympathy we lumber on in stage-coach fashion.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

… economic systems ... have never arranged themselves by themselves. It is men who do the ordering according to their attitudes, desires and understanding of things. Changes take place, not independent of man's will, but on account of man's wills. Civilization has progressed by man's interference with material conditions.

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.

The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.

I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

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

There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.