Quotes About Civilization

Discipline is what makes an army—and civilization.

The Americans of 1801 had more gadgets, better weapons, a superior knowledge of geography, and other advantages over the ancients, but they could not move goods or themselves or information by land or water any faster than had the Greeks and Romans.

Civilisation, after all, is not an attitude of mind, it is an attribute of wealth

Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

There's a sick joke that the reason we have not been contacted by an alien civilization is that civilizations tend to destroy themselves when they reach our stage. But I have sufficient faith in the good sense of public to believe that we might prove this wrong.

But ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we come from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

St. Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 B.C. for the Creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. (It is interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 B.C., which is when archaeologists tell us that civilization really began.)

History is scholarship. It is also art, and it is literature.

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.

Oh, I suppose all men of intelligence know how fragile such things as Law and Justice and Civilization really are, but it's not a thing they think of willingly, because it disturbs one's rest and plays hob with one's appetite.

In my opinion, an individual without any love of the arts cannot be considered completely civilized.

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Edward Carpenter looked at civilization as a kind of disease we have to pass through.48 This Decadence can be overcome. Confronting the nature of the whole is the inescapable challenge.

But as we have seen, recurring transitions and crises are proof that civilization never enjoys a long, untroubled sleep.

Work, as a distinct category of life, likewise did not exist until agriculture.

to know time is to fear it, and to know civilized time is to be terrorstricken.

Artificiality and work have steadily increased since its inception and are known as culture: in domesticating animals and plants man necessarily domesticated himself.

Humanitas is its Latin reference, opposed to immanis, or savage.

DeVries is correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization.

They speak as if it was some how beneficial to an African to work for them instead for himself and to make sure that he will receive this benefit they do their best to take away his land and leave him with no alternative. Along with his land they rob him of his government, condemn his religious ideas, and ignore his fundamental conceptions of justice and morals, all in the name of civilisation and progress.

Mesopotamia in the fifth or fourth millennium BCE was a magnet for nomads, drawing Sumerian-speaking peoples from the mountains or sea cultures and Semitic tribes that left the arid Arab Peninsula and migrated into the Mesopotamian greenbelt.

Whenever I hear people clucking about the decline of civilization, what's wrong with young people, how vulgar popular culture is, how confusing and frightening they find the internet, alarms go off. I know I'm around somebody whose hinges are rusting. Death will be bad enough, but for me, this early harbinger is more fearsome, because a part of one's spirit and openness and ability to learn and grow disappears.