Quotes About Civilization

We're headed for what is called Type 1 Civilization, planetary civilization. Type 2 would be stellar civilization, like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization would be galactic, like Star Wars. We are Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But the question is: Will we make it? Will we make the transition from Type 0 to Type 1? It's not clear.

The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization.

What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce. ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness - they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ... Knowledge is our destiny.

Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love.

For several centuries Western civilization has had a drive for material accumulation, continual extensions of economic power, termed 'progress'...The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature.

The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call "civilization" rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.

Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression. Poland's struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights we often take for granted, demonstrates why we dare not take those rights for granted.

Civilization, let me tell you what it is. First the soldier, then the merchant, then the priest, then the lawyer. The merchant hires the soldier and priest to conquer the country for him. First the soldier, he is a murderer; then the priest, he is a liar; then the merchant, he is a thief; and they all bring in the lawyer to make their laws and defend their deeds, and there you have your civilization!

The most outstanding characteristic of Eastern civilization is to know contentment, whereas that of Western civilization is not to know contentment. Contented Easterners are satisfied with their simple life and therefore do not seek to increase their material enjoyment... They are satisfied with their present lot and environment and therefore do not want to conquer nature but merely be at home with nature and at peace with their lot.

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

One reason which I find particularly fascinating about Israel is this. There is no such thing as a Jewish civilization. There is a Jewish culture, a Jewish religion, but there is no such thing as a Jewish civilization. The Jews were a component basically of two civilizations. In the Western world, we talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition and you talk about the Judeo-Islamic tradition because there were large and important Jewish communities living in the lands of Islam.

You can judge a civilization by its level of agreement with the green world. When people respect nature, it's a sign of a healthy situation. When they denigrate nature, it's a sign of an unhealthy civilization that will soon perish.

Loving Your Enemies... Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this demand is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes it is love that will save our world and civilization; love even for our enemies.

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

This knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for all of the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself.

Champagne is the wine of civilization and the oil of government.

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.

Government should uphold-and not undermine-those institutions which are custodians of the very values upon which civilization is founded: religion, education and, above all, family.

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.

Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.

The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behaviour that merely to recognize it is to risk unravelling the entire fabric of civilization.

I don't care two hoots about civilization. I want to wander in the wild.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us

I think fundamentalism is this radical attitude toward one's own identity and civilization as compared to other people's identities and cultures.

It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.

The future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public - a reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of true literary civilization - which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad.

There is little hope for us until we become tough-minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of soft mindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies.

Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.

White people deserve to be hit, deserve to be the victims of crime and acts of terror because they have for so long been the unfair, unjust, immoral majority throughout most of the nations that are imbued with Western civilization. If you think that’s an exaggeration, it isn’t. That is exactly how the Democrat Party of today and the American left looks at things.

If you know anything about Islamic civilization, or about the contemporary Middle East, about the sociology and the anthropology of the people who live there, and their recent history, and their religion, and their motivation and everything, then you realize that changing Iraq into a democracy is not going to happen. It's just not going to happen.

The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization.

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

We don't understand the power of nature and the world because we don't live with it. Our environment is designed to sustain us. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo called civilization.

The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

"Civilization" has been thrust upon me since the days of the reservations, and it has not added one whit to my sense of justice, to my reverence for the rights of life, to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity, or to my faith in Wakan Tanka, God of the Lakotas.

I do not believe the greatest threat to our future is from bombs or guided missiles. I don't think our civilization will die that way. I think it will die when we no longer care when the spiritual forces that make us wish to be right and noble die in our hearts.

Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.

Terrorism thrives on a free society. The terrorist uses the feelings in a free society to sap the will of civilization to resist. If the terrorist succeeds, he has won and the whole of free society has lost.

All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.

My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.