Quotes About Civilization

We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called monogamy. That's called civilization and its discontents.

Vico, who looks at the whole of human history and says, "mind made all this

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

Will Huxley's Brave New World come true one day in all its improbability and chilling inhumanity?

Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, by Charles Piazzi Smith, published in 1864,

Don't blame me. Tell your mom to move closer. Tell her there's this new club called civilization and you guys should join.

The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.

There is an equator that runs just under the nose: all that live below the equator are animals; all that live above it are men.

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

The Barbarian hopes -- and that is the very mark of him -- that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

Ever since mankind stopped wandering around aimlessly and started cultivating its own food, society has been growing more complex. As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born.

A civilizáció és bürokrácia egy másik kulcsfontosságú jellemz?je a tehetetlenség.

As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born.

There is no document of civilization," he wrote, "which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." That line is on his tombstone now.

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind...

My parents did not care whether I saw an opera or understood a statue; all that could be considered in time, in the future, for operas and statues belonged to urban culture, and my kinfolks said any person with any kind of background could acquire a city civilization, but that few city people could ever learn the culture of a rural country.

The first contribution of the ancient Greeks was the philosophy of natural law.

We need, in my estimate, four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity to pursue that purpose, communal moral purpose, and communal capacity to pursue that purpose. These four elements are crucial; the only foundation for a successful civilization lies in a careful balance of these four elements.

It is a memorable and counterintuitive fact that the invention of the city came long before the invention of the wheel.

Si dice che l'uomo sia un animale socievole. Stando così le cose, mi pare che un francese sia più uomo di un altro, è l'uomo per eccellenza, poichè sembra fatto unicamente per vivere in società." - Montesquieu, Lettre Persanes

A nation of spaghetti eaters cannot restore Roman civilization!

The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.