Quotes about civilization

Revenge is a human trait, one that has been the cause of the destruction of civilisations many times over. But the goblins live on in peace and harmony, taking little notice of us and our mistakes.

Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.

Empathy is a big part of Sparkleponies, because it’s also my belief (as a history and political science major) that societies that don’t practice rational empathy inevitably collapse – either by fomenting conflict from within by oppressing a segment/s of their populace, or seeking conflict from without by taking from others and eventually getting into a fight they can’t win.

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

It is not the sanctuary that is in danger; it is civilization. It is not infallibility that may go down; it is personal rights. It is not the Eucharist that may pass away; it is freedom of conscience. It is not divine justice that may evaporate; it is the courts of human justice. It is not that God may be driven from His throne; it is that men may lose the meaning of home; For peace on earth will come only to those who give glory to God! It is not the Church that is in danger, it is the world!

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is g

Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people decline. Without souls, they soon die, leaving dead shells, zombie cultures, shambling aimlessly towards oblivion.

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.

Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern he world in the was of peace, decency and mutual respect. I do not believe God ever intended it to be that way. He wants us to reach out and learn from the wisdom he has given to humanity over broad sweeps of time and place and personality.

Protecting the weak is the whole fucking basis for civilization. If you're not protecting the weak, you're not civilized. You're fucking animals.

He says that there can be no high civilization without enslavement of the masses, either nominal or real. There must, he says, be a lower class, given up to physical toil and confined to an animal nature; and a higher one thereby acquires leisure and wealth for a more expanded intelligence and improvement, and becomes the directing soul of the lower. So he reasons, because, as I said, he is born an aristocrat;—so I don't believe, because I was born a democrat.

Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.

Where do you. come from?" Frank challenged, puffing his chest, a little bolder now that he could breathe. "Some of us are starting to wonder.""I come from civilization," Lucius retorted. "You wouldn't be familiar with the territory. Now pick up the books.

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mis

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

The capitalists are the brains of civilization, because they supply the entire fabric of which all education, enlightenment and human progress consists.

The more civilized people are, the more honorable working hard is to them. As a result, the more civilized we get, the less we live.

Old Age homes are civilization's dumpsites for human beings who it cannot exploit further.

Green meant water, green patches meant farmers and farmers meant agriculture. Agriculture meant food to eat and food to sell, which meant towns and transport. They had reached civilization.

The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.

Civilization is the commercialization of survival.

Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.

The civilized man is technologically ahead of — intellectually behind — his time.

It ain't technology that enhances the civilization..but the way mankind perceives nature from all standpoints.

Further, any way of life based on the importation of resources is also functionally based on violence, because if your way of life requires the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable: if people in the next watershed over won't trade you for some necessary resource, you will take it, because you need it. So, to bring this to the present, we could all become enlightened, and the US military would still have to be huge: how else will they get access to the oil they need

The smile is civilization’s finest adornment. It signifies the willpower and duty to fashion mankind’s coexistence as quietly and agreeably as possible so that it will always appear friendly. For it is all a matter of appearance. The smile is culture’s diploma: it is the diplomat’s badge.

Without wonder, there's no progress. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. If you don't exercise your capacity for wonder... well, use it or lose it. A civilization without wonder is a civilization that's starting to atrophy and die.

I am well convinced that Aerial Navigation will form a most prominent feature in the progress of civilization. (1804)

Civilization on Earth planet was equated with selfishness and greed; those people who lived in a civilized state exploited those who did not. There were shortages of vital commodities on Earth planet, and the people in the civilized nations were able to monopolize those commodities by reason of their greater economic strength. This imbalance appeared to be at the root of thedisputes.

London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!

Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or more were effaced, and there he was, the alert and predatory sub-human, further from what she believed man should be like than the naked savage, because the savage was tractable, while this creature, wearing the armor of his own rigid barbaric culture, consciously defied progress. And that was what Stenham saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness, and excited his praise pre

O what we ben! And what we come to!

So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.

Wherever we look, the work of the chemist has raised the level of our civilization and has increased the productive capacity of our nation.

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.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

Patriotism is an indispensable weapon in the defense of civilization against barbarism.

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

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

One civilization after another has been wrecked upon the attempt to secure sufficient leadership from a single group or class.

In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.

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

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

The test of civilization is its estimate of women.

The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three million times is civilization.

When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others--using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers.

Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the

The collective consciousness of mankind defines the existence and sustainability of this civilization.

And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.

The most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of the civilization without its mercy.

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted

I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints.

The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying it

The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?

Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid, and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease!

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

Civilization transformed man from a food gatherer to a gatherer of pieces of paper: diplomas, employment contracts, money, etc.

If the Pentateuch is inspired, the civilization of of our day is a mistake and crime. There should be no political liberty. Heresy should be trodden out beneath the bigot's brutal feet. Husbands should divorce their wives at will, and make the mothers of their children houseless and weeping wanderers. Polygamy ought to be practiced; women should become slaves; we should buy the sons and daughters of the heathen and make them bondmen and bondwomen forever. We should sell our own flesh and blood,

I believe that without strict enforcement of penalties for any offence violating the principles of truth and honesty, Nigeria and Africa will not be able to move from our present state of underdevelopment into civilization.

The first Abenaki word I ever learned was Bitawbagok – the word they use for Lake Champlain. It means, literally, the waters between. Since I’ve come back from Quebec, I have thought of my address as Bitawkdakinna. I don’t know enough Abenaki to be sure it’s a real word, but translated, it is the world between. I had become a bridge between the natural world and the human one. I fit into both places and belonged to neither. Half of my heart lived with the wild wolves, the other half lived with

...that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too.

Unorganized morality is called sociability. Organized morality is called civilization. Unorganized immorality is called barbarity. Organized immorality is called statism.

According to H.G. Wells, you either adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. It is not necessary to change, after all survival is not mandatoryThis generation might seem arrogant to the older generation due to some reasons. The older generation believes an older person or someone of higher authority is always right and being sceptical is an insult, lolOur generation is full of people who are so skeptical, they wanna know why this is this and that is that, they don't just

Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more i

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral po

Back then: to be regarded as well-known, one had to be great. Today: to be regarded as great, one has to be well-known.

Why do they [Americans] quarrel, why do they hate Negroes, Indians, even Germans, why do they not have science and poetry commensurate with themselves, why are there so many frauds and so much nonsense? I cannot soon give a solution to these questions ... It was clear that in the United States there was a development not of the best, but of the middle and worst sides of European civilization; the notorious general voting, the tendency to politics... all the same as in Europe. A new dawn is not t

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

it wont be long now it wont be longman is making deserts of the earthit wont be long nowbefore man will have used it upso that nothing but antsand centipedes and scorpionscan find a living on it....what man calls civilizationalways results in deserts....men talk of money and industryof hard times and recoveriesof finance and economicsbut the ants wait and the scorpions waitfor while men talk they are making deserts all the timegetting the world ready for the conquering antdrought and erosion and

Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to s

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to s

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to s

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.

To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori...

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.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

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.

An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.

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.

Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.

Shaving was invented to kill time before a date.

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

In my own opinion, the average American's cultural shortcomings can be likened to those of the educated barbarians of ancient Rome. These were barbarians who learned to speak--and often to read and write--Latin. They acquired Roman habits of dress and deportment. Many of them handily mastered Roman commercial, engineering and military techniques--but they remained barbarians nonetheless. They failed to develop any understanding, appreciation or love for the art and culture of the great civilizat