Quotes About Civilization

Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear - civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify. Men's Needs.

Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness.

There are no defenders of man's mind—in the world's greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle—between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes.

Es cierto que la Internacional clama que «Hagamos tabla rasa del pasado» y que Mao se comparaba a un poeta genial que caligrafiaba sobre la famosa página en blanco. ¡Como si a una civilización de una antigüedad de varios milenios se la pudiera considerar una página en blanco!

She knew neither that she was living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra.

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good? Only good, mind you. The rest had to be shoved somewhere out of sight, under the rug. Which History indeed did, at times politely, at times police-ly, and yet something was always sticking out, breaking loose, overthrowing.

Czy je?eli ludo?erca je no?em i widelcem - to post?p?

It's what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!

Im wy?sza w galaktyce cywilizacja, tym wi?cej tam na?miecono.

We today can still talk of a return to nature, because we are relics of it, only slightly modified in biological respect within civilization, but try imagining the slogan 'return to nature' uttered by a robot. Why, it would mean turning into deposits of iron ore!

Thus the means of civilization replace its ends, and human conveniences substitute for human values.

Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?

Instead of learning something about an alien intelligence, they had learned how close the bonds of mental kinship were between man and his computer. The nearness of the alien civilization-practically within arm's reach - became a separating distance that mocked their attempts to get to the heart of it.

For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.

El ser humano ha emprendido el viaje en busca de otros mundos, otras civilizaciones, sin haber conocido a fondo sus propios escondrijos, sus callejones sin salida, sus pozos, o usus oscuras puertas atrancadas. - Solaris

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good? Only good mind you. The rest had to be shoved somewhere out of sight, under the rug. Which History did at times politely, at times police-ly, and yet something was always sticking out, breaking lose, overthrowing.

Lo que anhelábamos: el Contacto con otra civilización. ¡Lo tenemos, hemos establecido ese Contacto! ¡Nuestra propia fealdad, aumentada como bajo un microscopio, nuestra necedad y nuestra vergüenza!

The renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead said that what marks the beginning and assures the continuity of civilization is compassion.

And it wasn't just the subjugation of human beings that distressed her but the level of daily, almost casual brutality. Even for routine punishments there were blood-stained stakes, lead-tipped whips. She's always rather admired the Romans, for their literacy, their order, their engineering, their respect for the law. Now, she was finding, she'd never fully imagined this side of their civilisation.

Here, the Prophet was born in a settled and stable province of a strong Roman Empire. Much as in our timeline, Islamic civilisation, the dar-al Islam , flourished, but under Roman protection. There were no centuries of inter-faith conflict in Europe – no crusades, for instance. Even in the pre-Christian days, the Romans were always pragmatic about local religions. To the Romans, Islam is a muscular sister creed of the Christianity that is their official state religion.

But this is an instance where we also have to allow for some creative licence. Avatar is about a clash of cultures, the heavy handed technological human civilisation versus the gracef Navi, living lightly in their world.

Maybe it doesn't have to be the way Jake Sully bleakly summarized it to Eywa. Maybe there is a way for us to keep the Earth green, without giving up our civilization and all the benefits it brings: by using the resources of space.

But in that space were crammed humans, not animals.

But there have only ever been fewer than two hundred billion human beings