Quotes About Civilization

To be clear, civilization is not the same as society. Civilization is a specific, hierarchical organization based on 'power over.' Dismantling civilization, taking down that power structure, does not mean the end of all social order. It should ultimately mean more justice, more local control, more democracy, and more human rights, not less.

Before we can build a stable civilization worthy of humanity as a whole, it is necessary that each historical civilization should become conscious of its limitations and it's unworthiness to become the ideal civilization of the world.

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

Spanish civilization crushed the Indian. English civilization scorned and neglected him. French civilization embraced and cherished him.

We must appraise civilization in relation to its territory and in relation to its duration. The character of the medium of communication tends to create a bias in civilization favourable to an over-emphasis on the time concept or on the space concept and only at rare intervals are the biases offset by the influence of another medium and stability achieved.

I had a map on my wall that had a circle around Lubbock and then giant arrows pointing toward New York City and Los Angeles. Written across both arrows were the words 'Toward Civilization.' Of course, by the time I got to New York, I realized there really isn't any civilization.

Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.

Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.

In time, [a Martian] colony would grow to the point of being self- sustaining. When this stage was reached, humanity would have a precious insurance policy against catastrophe at home. During the next millennium there is a significant chance that civilization on Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid, a killer plague or a global war. A Martian colony could keep the flame of civilization and culture alive until Earth could be reverse-colonized from Mars.

It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.

The legalized liquor business is the tragedy of our civilization. Alcohol is the greatest and most blighting curse of our modern civilization. The liquor seller is simply and only a privileged malefactor - a criminal.

Think of our DNA. In the last million years, our DNA hasn't changed at all. It's really much the same as it was in the jungle, a million, two millions years ago. But in the last 200 years, our destructive capacities have increased many, many millions of times over. Why don't we see intelligent signals from outer space? Because in all likelihood, once the civilization reaches the point our civilization has reached, it destroys itself.

The home is the most important factor in civilization, and that civilization is to be measured at different stages largely by the development in the home.

In basic terms, civilization is dependent upon the spontaneity and fulfillment of the individual. Your civilization is in sad straits. Not because you are allowed spontaneity or fulfillment to individuals, but because you are denied it, and because your institutions are based upon that premise.

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

The world's most 'primitive' people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation.

When not protected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, [birds] yield very readily to the influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon by man.

We're living in a funny world kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, know what I mean? If we had all we wanted to eat, we'd eat too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry. That's the way I understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments I've heard.

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.

There are certain things for which civilization has no answer. But if you choose to meddle thus, then you must be prepared to facethe consequences, whatever they are.

We Christians must simplify our lives or lose untold treasures on earth and in eternity. Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. The need for solitude and quietness was never greater than it is today.

I zoomed in on the shoe department like a blonde homing pigeon. Shoes, shoes everywhere! Ah, sweet shoes. I truly think you can take the measure of a civilization by looking at its footwear.

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.

Are some free fonts a gift to humanity rather than a blight on typographic civilization ?

He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work.

Christianity and Western civilization-what countless crimes have been committed in thy name!

Unless we redesign our civilization in numerous ways, all of the science in the world won't save us.

The Philippines are ours forever. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America.

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

No true civilization can be expected permanently to continue which is not based on the great principles of Christianity.

Civilization is in no immediate danger of running out of energy or even just out of oil. But we are running out of environment-that is, out of the capacity of the environment to absorb energy's impacts without risk of intolerable disruption-and our heavy dependence on oil in particular entails not only environmental but also economic and political liabilities.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

In the last analysis civilization itself is measured by the way in which children will live and what chance they will have in the world

Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.

By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions - some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization - simply fail to exist in the first place.

At the heart of all that civilization has meant and developed is 'community' - the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother.

My belief is firm in a law of compensation. The true rewards are ever in proportion to the labor and sacrifices made. This is one of the reasons why I feel certain that of all my inventions, the Magnifying Transmitter will prove most important and valuable to future generations. I am prompted to this prediction not so much by thoughts of the commercial and industrial revolution which it will surely bring about, but of the humanitarian consequences of the many achievements it makes possible. Considerations of mere utility weigh little in the balance against the higher benefits of civilization.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

The richest person in the world - in fact. All the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library. You can measure the awareness, the breadth and the wisdom of a civilization, a nation, a people by the priority given to preserving these repositories of all that we are, all that we were, or will be.

America has entered a great struggle that tests our strength, and even more our resolve. Our nation is patient and steadfast. We continue to pursue the terrorists in cities and camps and caves across the earth. We are joined by a great coalition of nations to rid the world of terror. And we will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder. Now and in the future, Americans will live as free people, not in fear, and never at the mercy of any foreign plot or power.

"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.

Many people correctly make the point that our only hope is to turn to God. For example, Charles Lindbergh, who said that in his young manhood he thought "science was more important than either man or God," and that "without a highly developed science modern man lacks the power to survive," . . . went to Germany after the war to see what Allied bombing had done to the Germans, who had been leaders in science. There, he says, "I learned that if his civilization is to continue, modern man must direct the material power of his science by the spiritual truths of his God."

To the masses, the catchwords of Socialism sound so enticing... so they will continue to work for Socialism, helping thereby to bring about the inevitable decline of the civilization which the nations of the West have taken thousands of years to build up.

Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.

There is no escaping this fight. It is civilization or Jihadism. We can and should debate tactics; but the sides are clear enough.