Quotes About Civilization

There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: "The noise-producing animal." Now there was only the nearly imperceptible murmur of his own engine. He had no need to blow the horn. There were no back-firing trucks, no snorting trains, no pounding planes overhead. In the little towns no whistles blew or bells rang or radios blared or people talked. Even if it was the peace of death, still that was a kind of peace.

Babylon had fallen, never to rise again, but to it civilization owes much.

Money is governed today by the same laws which controlled it when prosperous men thronged the streets of Babylon, six thousand years ago.

The riches of Babylon were the results of the wisdom of its people.

I wish I could write a book that will be read for as long as our civilization lasts... I would value it much more highly than any business success if I could contribute to an understanding of the world in which we live or, better yet, if I could help to preserve the economic and political system that has allowed me to flourish as a participant.

The poet of the Pervigilium Veneris wrote in a darkening time, amid the breakdown of classic literacy. He knew that the Muses can fall silent: perdidi musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit: sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium. "To perish by silence": that civilization on which Apollo looks no more will not long endure.

To put it more precisely, since language is by definition the expression of civilised man, violence is silent. Civilisation and language grew as though violence was something outside. But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence.

Naquel mundo que era o seu, era case obrigatoria desexar sempre máis do que se podería adquirir. Non eran eles quen o decretaran; era unha lei da civilización, unha situación de feito, da cal a publicidade en xeral, os grandes almacéns, a arte dos escaparates, o espectáculo da rúa, e mesmo, en certa medida, o conxunto das produccións comunmente chamadas culturais, eran as expresións máis fidedignas.

Querían pelexar e vencer. Querían loitar, conquista-la súa felicidade. Pero, ¿como loitar? ¿Contra quen? ¿Contra que? Vivían nun mundo estraño e irisado, o universo reverberante da civilización mercantil, os cárceres da abundancia, as trampas fascinantes da felicidade.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

Rome will exist as long as the Coliseum does; when the Coliseum falls, so will Rome; when Rome falls, so will the world.

Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds - it's the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters. Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy.

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

One of the things that first attracted me to chess is that it brings you into contact with intelligent, civilized people - men of the stature of Garry Kasparov, the former world champion, who was my part-time coach.

To those acting against peace, civilization and the world order: We will oppose you.

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

I read 'The High Frontier' in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.

It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward.

Iran, in its former incarnation as Persia, created the world's first empire, produced titanic figures like Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, and is one of the great fonts of world culture.

Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related.

God makes it really clear that society and civilization is really held together by the glue of families... When a man and a woman come together and say 'I do,' they are committing for a lifetime to love each other and to model what love is and what forgiveness is and what joy is to their kids.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.