Quotes About Civilization

Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe.

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.

Some great crisis in its fate may stamp upon a race marks which neither lapse of time nor change of circumstance seem able wholly to efface; and empires may rise from barbarism to civilization and sink again from civilization into barbarism, within periods so brief that we may take it as certain, whatever be our opinion as to the transmission of acquired faculties, that no hereditary influence has had time to operate.

We must regard the raw material, as I have called it, of civilization as being now, in all probability, at its best, and henceforth for the amelioration of mankind we must look to the perfection of manufacture.

The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.

Pare mai totdeauna coliba s?lbaticului civilizat

Civilization is come. It has shut up a million of men within an area of four square leagues; it has stalled them in streets, houses, apartments, rooms, and chambers eight feet square; after a time it will make them shut up one upon another like the tubes of a telescope.

Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.

We've persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people - a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it's time to turn the page.

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.

Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.

All this visible greatness was really one with Nineveh and Tyre.

Germans felt similar emotions. The war was to be, wrote Thomas Mann, "a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers. The German soul," he explained, "is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization for is not peace an element of civil corruption?

Europe slipped back into savagery and paganism.

And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse -- the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a socio political monster called the welfare state to exist

One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.

Scratch the thin veneer of what man called culture or civilization and in most cases you would find a barbarian waiting to be set free.

Whether you are a believer—fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, liberal—or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the history of our civilization. Coming to understand what it actually is, and is not, is one of the most important intellectual endeavors that anyone in our society can embark upon.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.

Democracy is the menopause of Western society.

Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.

Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.