Quotes About Civilization

Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.

The vast upheaval of the World War set in motion forces that will either destroy civilization or raise mankind to undreamed of heights of human welfare and prosperity.

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization.

He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.

By 2200 B.C.E., five hundred years before Hammurabi issued his law code in Babylon, the civilization of the Indus Valley was a flourishing urban world of small brick houses and straight narrow streets, clean, efficient, and uniform, ruled by all-powerful theocrats whose temples were the very cities themselves.14

This is the legacy of the African continent to the nations of the world," George James says in Stolen Legacy, which "laid the foundations of modern progress." Later, the Greeks and other whites managed to steal all these civilized skills from the African man, leaving him in darkness. When he heard this, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger asked skeptically, "How does one lose knowledge by sharing it?

All the same, Aquinas had achieved what no one had before or since: a fusion of Platonized Christianity with Aristotle's science of man. It is one of the great achievements of Western civilization. But it didn't last. Even before Aquinas's death, the old opposition would reassert itself. He would be forced to leave the University of Paris and die in his former home of Naples while the intellectual battle raged around him.

with the new economic order, a new moral perspective was taking shape. The Enlightenment term for it was "politeness.

two-thousand-year struggle for the soul of Western civilization, which today extends to all civilizations: a struggle born from an act of rebellion. It came around 360 BCE, when the young Aristotle, son of the court doctor of the Macedonian kings, turned against the ideas of his famous teacher, Plato of Athens, and set out to create a school of his own.

For Sale, Europeans are nature-haters; they are cut off from life.

Nordau's theories gave a new twist to the question of how man's biological evolution and society's historical evolution intersected. A fourth and disturbing possibility now presented itself: even healthy human specimens living in advanced civilized society would, unless corrective steps were taken, degenerate into a lesser physical and moral type.

Christianity no longer just summed up ancient civilization's highest aims, as Justin and Clement had argued. It now had the power to save that civilization, Origen proclaimed, by bringing the highest moral principles down to earth right here.

The historical pessimist worries that his own society is about to destroy itself, the cultural pessimist concludes that it deserves to be destroyed.

Starting with chapter 1, Smith explains how the business of civilization gets done, by isolating the basic principle that explains all social improvement: the division of labor. This is Smith's term. The idea itself probably originated with David Hume, who called it "the partition of employments." We use another, perhaps better, word for it: specialization.

However, all of these "progressive" goals now require the unraveling of Western hegemony. Western civilization, once the driving force of human progress, is now treated as its greatest obstacle.

Susan Sontag did in 1967, that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, the emancipation of women … don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought on the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

It cultivated the same hatreds (industrial capitalism, soulless liberalism, cultural degradation) as its academic mentors, and many of the same goals. There was, however, one important difference. Radicals like Eckhart, Rosenberg, and Hitler were willing to contemplate direct action to overturn what they saw as a sick civilization, not just talk about it.

While Egypt gave the world its astronomy and science, China its art, and Mesopotamia its religion, the sole contribution of Nordic civilization was the factory. "As a system of culture," Du Bois announced, white civilization "runs chiefly to marvelous contrivances for enslaving the many, and enriching the few, and murdering both."42

In 1803, the liberal political economist Francis Jeffrey identified the middle class or "middling ranks" as the social stratum in which this progress took place. The reasonable, sober, polite, and industrious manners of the middle classes (in French, la bourgeoisie ), Jeffrey argued, form the cutting edge of civilization's moral, economic, and social improvement, which trickles down to the other ranks of society.

Being "civilized" had originally meant living under Roman, or "civil," law; but at the dawn of the Renaissance it had come to denote a way of life and law distinct from that of barbarism. It included prohibitions against murder, incest, and cannibalism; belief in a transcendant creative divinity; respect for property and legal contracts; and essential social institutions such as marriage, friendship, and the family.

To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.

Civilizations do not then "fall"—they are merely replaced by another culture, which is the product of the new population.

Amerind civilization, for all practical purposes, disappeared. The Amerind civilization in North America "fell" because the population of North America changed.

There are very subtle shades of violence, I can assure you. A civilization that renounces the possibility of resorting to violence in thought or deed destroys itself. It becomes a flock of sheep that will get their throats cut by the first person to come along. The same thing happens to men.