Quotes About Civilization

My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren't as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

There was a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized. Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe.

Islamism is a monstrous totalitarian ideology that has declared war on our nation, on reason, on civilization.

C. P. Snow—British intellectual, physicist, and novelist—is perhaps best known for his insistence that the "Two Cultures" of the sciences and the humanities had grown apart and should both be a part of our common civilization.

The application of time and skill to frivolous things is the hallmark of civilized society

De lo que se trata aquí es de la vacunación sistemática de todo un pueblo –el alemán– con un bacilo cuyo efecto consiste en que todos los portadores actúan contra el prójimo con ferocidad, o dicho de otro modo: se trata de liberar y cultivar aquellos instintos sádicos cuya represión y destrucción ha sido obra de un proceso civilizador de muchos miles de años de duración.

It is this lack of self-reliance that opens the possibility of immense catastrophes of civilization such as the rule of the Nazis in Germany.

Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.

Tradition looks at a traditional civilization as a tree. The root of the tree is permanent and firm in the ground of revelation, but the branches grow in different seasons and in different directions. Tradition does not deny the fact that if you have a harsh and dry winter, the next spring you have fewer flowers and that if you have a winter with more agreeable conditions, you will have more flowers.

The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance.

India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.

Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind - the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilized thing.

You cannot organize civilization around the core of militarism and at the same time expect reason to control human destinies.

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.

I'm not so sure it's so civilized to be civilized all the time.

Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.

We live in the least ugly time in history.

For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other—Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.

The vastness of possibilities in space reminded me that while my life felt important, it was tiny in the scheme of things. Human civilization was only a blink on the radar of time.

There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization.

Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.

Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.