Quotes About Civilization

It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but

It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing.

Man sank into a superstitious barbarism during which he distorted history to remove his sense of impotence and failure

And history could never take from him the privilege of being the first of all mankind to gaze upon the works of an alien civilization.

Miraculous though they were—perhaps the supreme triumph of the science that had produced them—they were the creations of a sick culture, a culture that had been afraid of many things.

There was an almost total breakdown in the standard institutions of modern civilization, creating a phantasmagoric life for everyone in the world except the privileged few in their protected retreats.

Desde el alba de los tiempos, aproximadamente cien mil millones de seres humanos han transitado por el planeta Tierra.

I do not think it possible to convey the moral energy that went into this division between abstraction and realism, from both sides, in those years. It had an almost theological intensity, and in another stage of civilization there would certainly have been burnings at stake.

All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage.

Civilization was a thin, dangerously fragile veneer, and when that veneer cracked, man became one with the beasts again, falling back into the slime of the primeval abyss he prided himself on having climbed up from.

Nothing was sacred, nothing was safe. Privacy in today's civilization was a delusion, a myth. Every citizen was exposed, his deepest secrets laid bare, waiting to be read. ... If one knew where to look, and if one was patient, all the facts were available.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....

Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less perfect.

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.

If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education.

what we know to be useless, but expect civilization to value, is beauty;

Individual liberty is not an asset of civilization.

We are saying much the same thing when we derive the antithesis between civilization and sexuality from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals.

We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.

Expressando-o de modo sucinto, existem duas características humanas muito difundidas, responsáveis pelo fato de os regulamentos da civilização só poderem ser mantidos através de certo grau de coerção, a saber, que os homens não são espontaneamente amantes do trabalho e que os argumentos não têm valia alguma contra suas paixões.