Quotes About Civilization

Man has no nature; what he has is history.

This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.

One of the most impressive civilizing offensives of the 1990s came from African American communities, who set themselves the task of recivilizing their young men. As with the pacifying of the American West a century before, much of the moral energy came from women and the church.

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention. —Henry Maine

For most of the history of civilization, the practice of slavery was the rule rather than the exception.

This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance. DECIVILIZATION

If we could canvass the souls of the dead children and mothers and the victims of war and starvation and disease, or if we went back in time and gave them a choice between proceeding with their lives in a premodern or modern world, we might uncover an appreciation of modernity that is more commensurate with its objective benefits.

between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

Una civilización optimista está abierta a la innovación y no la teme, y se basa en las tradiciones de la crítica.

As Europe became more urban, cosmopolitan, commercial, industrialized, and secular, it got safer and safer.

raped, or killed, and it's hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

This isn't the first time we've been warned of certain ruin. The experts have predicted civilization-ending aerial gas attacks, global thermonuclear war, a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a Chinese razing of half of humanity, nuclear powers by the dozen, a revanchist Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a world war fought over diminishing oil, nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and weekly 9/11-scale attacks.

It's not immediately obvious why, out of all the weapons of war, poison gas was singled out as uniquely abominable—as so uncivilized that even the Nazis kept it off the battlefield.

Scandinavians needed a couple of additional centuries before they thought the better of killing each other, and Italians didn't get serious about it until the 19th century. But by the 20th century the annual homicide rate of every Western European country had fallen into a narrow band centered on 1 per 100,000.

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.

Islamic civilization had a precocious scientific revolution, and for much of its history was more tolerant, cosmopolitan, and internally peaceful than the Christian West.

progress" unguided by humanism is not progress.

People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It's hard to follow the news without a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we are apt to forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago, and to be blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out.

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

Calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in no way Islamophobic or civilization-clashing. The overwhelming majority of victims of Islamic violence and repression are other Muslims.

El romántico movimiento verde no ve la captación humana de energía como una forma de resistir la entropía y promover la prosperidad humana, sino como un crimen atroz contra la naturaleza, que conducirá a una guerra de recursos, aire y agua contaminados y que comportará un cambio climático que acabará con la civilización.

The invention of farming around ten thousand years ago multiplied the availability of calories from cultivated plants and domesticated animals, freed a portion of the population from the demands of hunting and gathering, and eventually gave them the luxury of writing, thinking, and accumulating their ideas.

Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.