Quotes About Civilization

Fire, slavery, cloth, coin, and stone - these are the basis of civilized life. Sometimes it happens that one or another of them gets hopelessly involved in the most basic appetites of a woman or a man. There are people I have met in my travels who cannot eat food unless it has been held long over fire; and there are others, like me, who cannot love without some mark of possession. Both, no doubt, seem squally strange and incomprehensible to you, 'ey, barbarian?

The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.

Is that a good enough reason to think that China and India, Africa and the Americas, whether at pole or equator, are simply uncivilised because they are different?

Those who think themselves to be civilized are not always particularly intelligent, or rational.

I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints.

You traitor! We took you out of darkest Africa, got you civilized, gave you the word of our Redeemer Jesus Christ, and this is the thanks?

Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

Our civilisation has lost this bond between times, and tends to measure time with a yardstick, bit by bit, from one point to another.

Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.

Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.

All of us confront limits of body, talent, temperament. But that is not all. We are, all of us, also constrained by our time, our place, our civilization.

Some people die before their time so that others can live. It's a cornerstone of civilization.

It is time for a new compact among the civilized peoples of this world to eradicate war at its most fundamental source: the corruption of young minds by violent ideology.

Man simply cannot live as the time-animal and the art-animal that he is, without history.

How transcendent is the virtue of the middle conduct! Rare for a long time has been its practice among the people.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished.

L'incivilimento dei costumi, il progresso delle idee durante l'ultimo secolo è opera d'una minoranza esigua di spiriti illuminati; la massa resta ignara, feroce quando può, sempre egoista e gretta, e si può scommettere fondatamente che tale resterà sempre.

In a world gone mad, we can choose to be sane. In order to move ourselves, and our civilization, into the next phase of our evolutionary journey, it's time for all of us to awaken.

For one thing she [Alice Hayward] possessed that passionate love of abstract justice which has become more a woman's than a man's trait, in our modern civilisation.

The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization... Why we do things will not change, but how we will do them will... If the Library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.