Quotes About Civilization

Lo, all our pomp of yesterdayIs one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Lesser breeds without the Law.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father, mother, children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

Our human dependence on the living processes of the earth was largely forgotten with the growth of industrial civilization. Now we are being forced to remember that Gaia is greater than we are and that the human economy is embedded within the ecology of the biosphere. So, in what sense is Gaia alive? And what difference does it make if we think of her as a living organism, as opposed to an inanimate physical system?

The true natural rights of men, then, are equal justice, security of labor and property, the amenities of civilized institutions, and the benefits of orderly society.

And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man. If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.

How are we ever going to understand what happens when a civilization comes apart at the seams, as it did in Germany, if we fail to see the most glaring distinctions, such as the gender gap?

Douglas Hyde's Beside the Fire, William Butler Yeats's The Celtic Twilight, Lady Augusta Gregory's Visions and Beliefs of the West of Ireland, and Standish O'Grady's collections not only established Irish folklore as one of the great oral literature traditions of Western civilization, but also provided an immense source of pride for the growing Irish Nationalist movement.

You might think that people in the business of selling books would be against places where you can read books for free, but here is a secret: libraries are awesome, librarians are even *more* awesome, and both are among the greatest things civilization has given us. *No apologies; it's true.*

Humanity is a disease that needs to be eradicated.

If reason ruled the world would history even exist?

Hoy en día, en nombre de la civilización y la etiqueta, las personas educadas no suelen experimentar plenamente ninguna de sus emociones. No pueden llorar plenamente. No pueden reírse a carcajadas. Con el paso del tiempo, la frustración se apodera de ellos y se quedan sin alegría.

and the end of rational animals is to follow the reason and the law of the most ancient city and polity.

Humanity's universal sin is far, far worse than those traditional vice lists cited for Greeks and Jews by Paul in Romans 1–3. It is this: we have accepted violence as civilization's drug of choice, and our addiction now threatens creation itself.

Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble.

He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I'm aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at the stone-worshipping stage. Though surely it is not this affable inquisitiveness that should be blamed.

For a whole month they'd had to play Barbarian Stomp (See If You Can Change History!). One side had the cities and the riches and the other side had the hordes, and – usually but not always – the most viciousness. Either the barbarians stomped the cities or else they got stomped, but you had to start out with the historical disposition of energies and go on from there.

The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend—a madman, say - Lies, perhaps, Merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.

Perhaps it was no accident that it was a Viennese, Sigmund Freud, who was to come up with the notion of the narcissism of small differences. As he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, 'it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.

There was no one to tell Scarlett that her own personality, frighteningly vital though it was, was more attractive than any masquerade she might adopt. Had she been told, she would have been pleased but unbelieving. And the civilization of which she was a part would have been unbelieving too, for at no time, before or since, had so low a premium been placed on feminine naturalness.

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out. At least, it has been interesting, if not comfortable, to witness a Gotterdammerung.' 'A what?' 'A dusk of the gods. Unfortunately, we Southerners did think we were gods.

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one. -Rhett Butler

There's just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.