Quotes About Civilization

he sincerely loathed slavery; he called it "an abominable crime" and a blot on civilization.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself." (Interview, New York Post Magazine , September 14, 1958)

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Bill McKibben named his climate change advocacy group 350.org, because 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide is what Dr. James Hansen, former head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the most respected climatologists in the world, says is the maximum level to "preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted." Tragically, we have now exceeded 400 ppm.

For once you must try not to shirk the facts: Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.

Hoh, Boy!" Freddy snorted, slapping his palm to his forehead. "I hope you never donate your brain to science. It would set civilization back fifty years.

Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting

Even in civilized mankind faint traces of monogamous instincts can be perceived.

But the process of birthing Claire changed what I wanted to write about. It left me feeling betrayed that I'd been unprepared for the pure animal nature of birth. For the first time, I understood myself to be a mammal with a mammal's instincts and desires beneath the veneer of civilization - a mammal just as much as the opossum with its thirteen nipples.

Whether the so-called ¨sacred prostitution¨ was actually practiced is doubtful....Henshaw asserts, 'those of us who have studied Mesopotamian civilization for many years have never come across anything remotely near this practice.

Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevailent [sic] only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.

Civilization can not be put into a ship and carried across an ocean.

For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we are indebted to the Old World; the errors and mischiefs are of our own creation.

It hurts to see what civilization has done to reduce (within 100km) a princess to the status of a rag picker and make smiling nymph of nature a toothless old crone.

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

Our 'Hooligans' go from bad to worse. They are an ugly growth on the body politic, and the worse circumstance is that they multiply, and that School Boards and prisons, police magistrates and philanthropists, do not seem to ameliorate them. Other great cities may throw off elements more perilous to the State. Nevertheless the 'Hooligan' is a hideous excrescence on our civilization. The Times [London], October 30, 1890

First, I worry about climate change. It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible

There are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.

Patriotism is an indispensable weapon in the defense of civilization against barbarism.

Day to day, we forget that if the billions of years of life on Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilizations began about a fifth of a second ago.

I said before that the human game we've been playing has no rules and no end, but it does come with two logical imperatives. The first is to keep it going, and the second is to keep it human.

Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart. And civilization doesn't just happen; we have to make it happen.