Quotes About Civilization

Every lawsuit results from somebody doing something wrong. If everybody did right, we wouldn't need laws.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act.

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization.

We've been civilized from the beginning. In the desert, it's a baroque city like Paris or Rome.

No system of religion should go in partnership with barbarism. Neither should any Christian feel it his duty to defend the savagery of the past.

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

To lie is to degrade and besmirch oneself," we say, and yet all civilized life becomes one huge lie. We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man. But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth or cease to exist.

man lived in societies for thousands of years before he knew of the State

Man did not create society; society existed before man.

The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.

If these devices appear in large enough numbers, it could mean the end of the electric grid that underlies industrial civilization. Homes would still be connected, but the nature of interconnection would change and economics of location would be different.

Every bride and groom in the history of civilization has gained weight after their wedding day. It is only a matter of time until archaeologists unearth a married caveman who's wearing a pair of old tux pants that were so tight he couldn't get the zipper closed.

Alors que ce mauvais siècle approche de sa fin, le pressentiment se répand que l'idée de faire histoire n'était qu'un prétexte. Le sujet décisif de la modernité, c'est de faire nature.

This much should be clear by now: the term 'renaissance' can only remain fruitful and demanding as long as it refers to a far-reaching idea: that it is the fate of Europeans to develop life and forms of life according to and alongside the Christian definitions of life and forms of life.

There has been too much destruction of knowledge simply because someone else disagrees with it. In a civilised world, there is room for all knowledge and the truth will eventually emerge triumphant over prejudice. If we do not believe that, then there is no hope for us. We might as well resort to living as wild animals.

We know that, over the past 10,000 years, larger polities consistently outcompeted smaller ones, with the result that 99.8 percent of people today live in countries with populations of one million or more.

It takes at least 100 human generations for agricultural societies to develop into states

The first cities and states arose 5,000 years ago. One of these archaic states, the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2650–2150 BCE), the one that built the Great Pyramid of Giza, had a population of between one and two million, which is beginning to approach the social scale of the most complex social insects, ants and termites. The

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.

I love history. It's so old." - Attributed to Peter Ustinov.

The 60s just felt more murderous than the 50s. It seemed like a man made plague of violence in the middle of an apocalyptic siege, with serial killers being catapulted like diseased carcasses over the protective walls of civilization harboring the tattered remains of the illusory innocent America we had believed in the decade before.

reader is asked, for the moment, to accept this as a reasonable statement of fact, that in a part of the world that had for centuries been civilised, and quite highly civilised, there gradually emerged a people, not very numerous, not very powerful, not very well organised, who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.

Cities are the graveyard of Mankind.