If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force.

If government half a century ago had provided us with all our dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators today to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.

You will not make a man wiser by taking freedom of action from him. A man can only learn when he is free to act.

It is the small owner who offers the only really profitable and reliable material for taxation. He is made for taxation.

How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?

Every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive.

And what sort of philosophical doctrine is thi - that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others.

The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation.

How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed.

The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them.

We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.

Deny human rights, and however little you may wish to do so, you will find yourself abjectly kneeling at the feet of that old-world god, Force.

Do you not see, first, that - as a mental abstract - physical force is directly opposed to morality; and secondly, that it practically drives out of existence the moral forces?

If you tie a man's hands there is nothing moral about his not committing murder.

The course that will restore to the workmen a father's duties and responsibilities, between which and themselves the state has now stepped, is for them to reject all forced contributions from others, and to do their own work through their own voluntary combinations.

There never yet has been a great system sustained by force under which all the best faculties of men have not slowly withered.

I venture to prophesy that there lies before us a bitter and an evil time.

If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

It has been said that the position of woman is the test of civilization, and that of our women was secure. In them was vested our standard of morals and the purity of our blood.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding.

Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.

To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

To one who believes that really good industrial conditions are the hope for a machine civilization, nothing is more heartening than to watch conference methods and education replacing police methods.

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

The slum is the measure of civilization.

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.