Quotes About Civilization

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

...What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

It is suggested that all written works, including this one, have dangerous implications to the vitality of an oral tradition and to the health of a civilization, particularly if they thwart the interest of a people in culture, and following Aristotle, the cathartic effects of culture. "It is written but I say unto you" is a powerful directive to Western civilization.

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!

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

These European White Men, then, with civilization in their blood and in their destiny, crossed the Atlantic and set up a new civilization on a bleak and rock bound coast. It was the White Men who drove north to Alaska and west to California; the men who opened up the tropics and subdued the Arctics; the men who mastered the African Veldts; the men who peopled Australia and seized the gates of the world at Suez, Gibraltar and Panama.

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.

Solidarity, compassion, caring, communion and loving. Such values and inner powers can lay the foundation of a new paradigm of civilization, the civilization of the humanity reunited in the Common House, on the Planet Earth our mission is to celebrate the greatness of Creation and connect it again to the Core where it came from and to where it will go, with care, lightness, joy, reverence and love.

The British Government in India constitutes a struggle between modern civilization, which is the Kingdom of Satan, and the ancient civilization, which is the Kingdom of God.

Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.

There is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting.

I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him agesof education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.

Some mothers in today's world feel "cumbered" by home duties and are thus attracted by other more "romantic" challenges. Such women could make the same error of perspective that Martha made. The woman, for instance, who deserts the cradle in order to help defend civilization against the barbarians may well later meet, among the barbarians, her own neglected child.

Women's fight for equal rights is essentially a humanist and peaceful struggle for true democracy, and a higher form of civilization.

Civilization just takes it as a given that the whole world was flooding. Then science came and you had geology and modern astrophysics, and time became well understood going back billions of years. So enlightened religious people, as a necessity, had to shed the magical elements of the Bible. A little known fact is that Thomas Jefferson did just that. There's something called the Jefferson Bible. It's not widely publicized because it sort of conflicts with certain people's ideas of what the founding fathers were.

Civilization, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants.

Iraq is no diversion. It is a place where civilization is taking a decisive stand against chaos and terror, we must not waver.

So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.

One could judge the degree of civilization of a country by the social and political position of its women

The discovery of electrical waves... has had a profound influence on civilization; it has been instrumental in providing the methods which may bring all inhabitants of the world within hearing distance of each other and has potentialities social, educational and political which we are only beginning to realize.

Speed is one of the great curses of modern civilization, obsession with speed leads to quantitative approach; we come to believe that more is better. This is very materialistic, we have to realize that it is the quality of life, quality of relationships, quality of food, medicine, education and everything else which matters.

Artists are the radical voice of civilization.

The degree of a nation’s civilization can be seen in the way it treats its prisoners

Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.

Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.

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.

The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.

Not only is patriotism disdained, the very basis for pride in one's country and culture is systematically undermined in our educational institutions at all levels. The achievements of western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west.

No civilization is complete which does not include the dumb and defenseless of God's creatures within the sphere of charity and mercy.

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

Civilization is the art of creating useless needs.

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

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.

We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.

The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.

Beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.

It is, then, the strife of all honorable men and women of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and imprudence and cruelty.

How much modern civilization has lost, I think, when they lost the awareness of the billions of stars overhead.

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.

The highest test of the civilization of any race is in its willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate.

There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it's because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it's still better than skipping through a meadow.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!

Ancient Egypt was a Negro Civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt.