Quotes About Civilization

When will women become civilized enough to stop mistreating men? When will they cease from training their lovers to become providers, merely because they have the power to do so? As long as they continue as they are, men have no alternative to polygamy.

Is it not very clear that progress, that is to say, the onward march of all things, good as well as evil, has brought our civilization to the brink of an abyss into which it may possibly fall, giving place to utter barbarism? And the reason for this…is it not to be found in the law that dominates all others here below, the need for change in some form or other? We must change. (Monday 23 April 1849)

Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.

The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become "means." There is no longer an "end"; we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere. JACQUE SELLUL

Where are we as a modern civilization if our educational institutions conspire to train only a fraction of our capacities? and if this is all they can really do, then why not acknowledge that fact openly and give legitimacy to the other alternative forms of education that do cultivate those neglected dimensions of personality, instead of pretending that anything lying outside the standards set by the Wester analytic tradition is either inferior, anti-intellectual, or diabolic? (p. 293-294)

The pull of the organic towards the inorganic, of the animate towards the inanimate, of the living towards the unliving - the pull towards something "old." In these moments, the human being is turned inside-out, revealing the entirety of human civilization as a bg-brain neurosis, beneath which a deeper, multi-layered geo-trauma manifests itself in a myriad of ways, from frenetic protozoa to the torpid, stumbling forth of human self-awareness.

We use this comparison, even if improperly, because dogs, hyenas, or other fierce beasts never do the evil things that men do.)

That contagion idea is so relevant and shows how quickly civilization could self-destruct.

That sacred space of conscience where you can exercise your rights in terms of religious freedom and deeply-held, reasonable beliefs is the core of human dignity. In fact, that's the basis for civilization itself. And when you lose that fundamental principle... you have no basis on which to build.

Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it's literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What's at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works.

Remember that a civilized nation cannot just have one party; if there were only one party, this would merely be a dictatorship. Politics could not advance.

I remind everybody that the Sabbath was the Jewish gift to civilization.

Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.

The reason renewables can't power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.

George Bush doesn't represent any civilization!

Repression is the enemy of civilization - so keep dreaming, because the dreams we dream today will provide the love, the compassion, and the humanity that will narrate the stories of our lives tomorrow.

In the world over, the very name of our country is immediately associated with the Parthenon.

Marriage civilizes males by making them responsible for their children and by imposing on boys the need to develop the bourgeois habits of self-discipline and work that make them attractive mates.

Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us.

On climate change, we are told that there will be a civilization-ending development in the form of massive sea level rise as soon as 2050. Anybody plan to be here in 2050? I think a few of us do, myself included.

During the civilisation and development process of more than 5,000 years, the Chinese nation has made an indelible contribution to the civilisation and advancement of mankind.

Let Indian history be set side by side with Europe history with what there is of the latter century by century and let us see whether India need blush at the comparison.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.