Quotes About Civilization

Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

Compared with the thousands of years in which human life has been on this planet, Christianity is a recent development.

Reading civilized the inner life.

wild animals in captivity and humans in civilization share an important quality: we are both examples of species living outside their natural habitats.

As for bad genetics, well, heart disease happens to be the number one killer of male gorillas in captivity. Heart disease is also the number one killer of male humans in civilization. Median life expectancy for male gorillas in zoos is thirty-one years, so Mokolo's age of twenty-two roughly corresponds to a man in his fifties. While heart disease may be common at this age, there's nothing inevitable about a middle-aged man—or gorilla—dying from a heart attack.

It has been suggested that the aliens are many thousands of years ahead of human beings in their mastery of various technologies. Perhaps so. In any event, we cannot begin to answer any of these questions within the framework of modern science.

There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. It was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for them to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.

Moreover, the papal system has opposed the march of civilization and liberty throughout the world, by denouncing the circulation of the Bible, and the general diffusion of knowledge. Turn to every land where popery predominates, and you will find an ignorant and debased peasantry, a profligate nobility, and a priesthood, licentious, avaricious, domineering and cruel.

Politics are popularly supposed to govern the direction, and statesmen to be the guardian angels, of Civilization. It seems to me that they have little or no power over its growth. They are of it, and move with it. Their concern is rather with the body than with the mind or soul of a nation. One needs not to be an engineer to know that to pull a man up a wall one must be higher than he; that to raise general taste one must have better taste than that of those whose taste he is raising.

Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.

Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease that results from eating sugar and refined carbohydrates. It appeared among the earliest recorded diseases of civilization, coincident with sugar and flour appearing in people's diets in places as distinct as Africa and Arizona, and has been with us for more than a century. But this is not a static story.

Native American farmers revealed all of these problems. Native Americans showed evidence of suffering diseases of civilization long before Western civilization arrived, which is why we need to define civilization as the arrival of domestication, of agriculture. We are really talking about diseases of agriculture and adoption of the sedentary way of life.

In fact, through deep history, through tens of thousands of years, everyone was a wild human. The very same forces that tamed wolves and made them dogs tamed humans. Call these forces civilization, and yes, obvious and abundant benefits came with the deal. We're not here to dispute those blessings. Our bedrock point has more to do with genes

One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, - to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.

Had the Saracens captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe – and America – might be Muslim today.

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.

Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature.

The great and cheif end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property; to which in the state of Nature there are many things wanting

Whether there be any such moral principles, wherein all men do agree, I appeal to any who have been but moderately conversant in the history of mankind, and looked abroad beyond the smoke of their own chimneys.

And amongst those who are counted the civilized part of mankind

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.

Civilization: a thin veneer over barbarianism.

It is the attendance at a great meal, with one too many courses and two too many glasses of wine, that makes civilization spin, romance bloom and friendship last.