Civilization Quotes

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Shaving was invented to kill time before a date.

You've made a beast of yourself,- to the beasts you may go.

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new.

Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune.

The three great elements of modern civilization Gunpowder Printing and the Protestant Religion.

We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.

[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.

The fact that Man is Nature’s perverse instantiation can only lead to the appalling conclusion that Man, too, is some kind of an artificial intelligence

...the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines...

Advanced weaponry, victories in battle and space travel do not an advanced species or civilization make.

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.

After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate?

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.

Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems to be their nature.- Yes; it's a funny habit.- No, it's not funny; you are wrong there. There's nothing funny in nature, however funny it may seem to man. If dogs could reason and criticize us they'd be sure to find just as much that would be funny to them, if not far more, in the social relations of men, their masters -far more, I think. I am more convinced that there is far more foolishness among us.

Scientists are the true driving force of civilization.

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.

If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.

I know that [civilized men] do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains.... But when I see [barbarous man] sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.

Time has a different meaning for me, and these events that seem so monumental in the moment will one day be nothing more than a line in a scroll. These humans are but letters to be inked into history. A hundred years from now, I will be free. I will have forgotten their names and faces, and the struggles they have will not matter. Time has a way of burying things, shifting like the desert and swallowing entire civilizations, erasing them from map and memory. Always, in the end, everything returns to dust.

[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.

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 addict who believes against all evidence that what he can't give up won't lead to suffering and death, our culture adheres to its ideas in spite of ample, clear evidence they will lead to suffering and death.

The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations - and absolutely nothing more.

Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didin't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we didn't have any delinquents. Without a prison, there can't be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white man arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.

In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.

Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed.

Civilization has made life a humanized jungle, a sugar coated jungle, but still a jungle

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me.Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency.

His insights have come to him through a crack in the veneer of civilization, which was also a crack in his own soul. He had the courage to look in this direction.

The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.

Any nation that wishes to enjoy the fruits of development and civilization, must follow the golden rules of this scripture as a national policy and culture.

Whatever name civilizations give to the arrangement where a man lives with a woman, it is always better to call it a marriage.

Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity, modern history has postulated its own aims- the welfare of the French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large continent.

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies fromindifference toward the unique values which created it.

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.

The engineered built environments or domesticated landscapes of certain Amazonian peoples were as impressive as any Egyptian pyramid, Mesopotamian city, or Chinese terrace-irrigiation system. In the Amazon, the transformation was driven by social demands: social group formation, domestic routines, territoriality, local environmental knowledge, gifting, and competitive feasting.

There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.

Society destroys your individuality, your soul.

Somewhere on the Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save The World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle.

We’re living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I’ve heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone’s familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion’s needed at the roots.

I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization.

People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

The old school of thought would have you believe that you'd be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn't what being in nature is all about. Rather, it's about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization—not bringing them with us.

Civilization must be preserved,' says he.'Civilization's doing fine,' I said. 'We just don't happen to be where it is.

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. Ralph Waldo Emerson

No civilization can thrive or survive if it refuses to adapt or change.

What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.

If you would civilize a man begin with his grandmother.

...a woman smart and persistent enough that even a PhD in psychology hasn't clouded her insight into how people think and act.

All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best

People in this civilization are starving in the middle of plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge.

Super-eruption of mount Toba, 76,000 years ago had wiped out a previous great civilization on earth.

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

In God's scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this civilization we are living in destroys itself, it will all start up again in a million years when the planet has all its messes cleaned up. Then, finally, one of these civilizations, say five billion years from now, will last because people treat each other the way they ought to.

A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.

The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.