Quotes About Civilization

Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life: (1) hunting-and-gathering societies; (2) agricultural societies; and (3) industrial societies.

Another important contributing factor to Rome's collapse was a demographic deficit caused by the Antonine plagues.

The idea of property emerged as an inevitable consequence of farming.

And if all has gone according to plan, we have sent the brightest, the strongest, the toughest of our subjects to a safe place, where they can begin civilization anew while the rest of the world is driven to extinction.

the character of American civilization is a bundle of contradictions,

but such is the inertia of industrial civilization that we are likely to go on using fossil fuel for a decade at least.

We are like passengers on a large aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean who suddenly realize just how much carbon dioxide their plane is adding to the already overburdened air. It would hardly help if they asked the captain to turn off the engines and let the plane travel like a glider by wind power alone. We cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered civilization without crashing; we need the soft landing of a powered descent.

While man exists in this mortal state he needs some of the things of the world; he must have food and clothing and provision for shelter; and beside these bare necessities he may righteously desire the facilities of education, the incidentals of advancing civilization, and the things that are conducive to refinement and culture; yet all of these are but aids to achievement, not the end to attain which man was made mortal.

The American axe! It has made more real and lasting conquests than the sword of any warlike people that ever lived; but they have been conquests that have left civilization in their train instead of havoc and destruction…. A brief quarter of a century has seen these wonderful changes wrought; and at the bottom of them all lies this beautiful, well-prized, ready, and efficient implement, the American axe!

Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians!

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

When they come to chronicle the decline of this civilization," he said, "they're going to wonder why we were debating flag burning, abortion, and broccoli eating instead of the fundamental issues of how we live and use the environment.

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflection on human nature?

Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations.

But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature.

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

Being undivided, nature cannot be used against itself. We do not therefore consume it, or exhaust it. We simply rearrange our societal patterns in a way that reduces our ability to respond creatively to the existing patterns of spontaneity. That is, to use the societal expression, we create waste. Waste, of course, is by no means unnatural. The trash and garbage of a civilization do not befoul nature; they are nature-but in a form society no longer is able to exploit for its own ends.

The Master Player in us tolerates this indifference scarcely at all. Indeed, we respond to it as a challenge, an invitation to confrontation and struggle. If nature will offer us no home, offer us nothing at all, we will then clear and arrange a space for ourselves. We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization. We count among the highest achievements of modern society the development of a technology that allows us to master nature's vagaries.

Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century's grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.

It is by no means an accident that the only successful attempt of the American citizenry to force the ending of a foreign war occurred simultaneously with a wide revision in sexual attitudes. The civilization quickly recovered from this threat, however, by tempting these revolutionaries into a new sexual politics, one of societal standoff, where sexual genius is confused with such struggles as the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and the election of women to national office.

To use Freud's famous phrase, the civilized are, therefore, the discontent. We do not become losers in civilization but become civilized as losers. The collective result of this ineradicable sense of failure is that civilizations take on the spirit of resentment. Acutely sensitive to an imagined audience, they are easily offended by other civilizations.