Quotes About Civilization

Indeed, a parallel history of Europe could be written which viewed family life and regular work as the essential Continental motor of civilization. Then war and revolution would need to be seen by historians as startling, sick departures from that norm of a kind that require serious explanation, rather than viewing periods of gentle introversy as mere tiresome interludes before the next thrill-packed bloodbath.

The city is the teacher of the man.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

When all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him.

Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.

It is an altogether wrong idea that the modern product of civilization is less susceptible to love. I sometimes think it is the other way.

I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But and I are savages.

For an America of wisdom that honors the family, knowing that if the family goes, so goes our civilization.

Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight.

Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they exerted upon the landscape. This was what survived them. A hundred billion lives had passed without leaving a mark since the Egyptians had raised their pyramids, changing the world not figuratively but literally.

If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost—he becomes just a unit in unreason.

If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost--he becomes just an unit in unreason.

and, let us not forget, the culmination of nearly five thousand years of continuous Chinese history.

A race like these Mayas, who hadn't discovered the wheel and built pyramids and temples in the jungle, where everything becomes smothered in moss and crumbles with damp—what for?

it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence—nature, the arts, human love.

America was aptly described by George Bernard Shaw, who said that it was 'the only country which had gone from barbarism to decadence without once passing through civilization.

Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

The more uncivilised the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. The truly civilised man is always skeptical and tolerant. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.

Seen without the gilded lies that comprise what we call "civilization," history is an assemblage of massacres, mass enslavements, conflagrations, a growing accretion of ruins. Time had to be "blasted out" and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it us.

There is no document of civilization," he wrote, "which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way.

without learning, a kingdom is a mere husk of ignorant barbarism.

The law. we are told, is what makes us men under God instead of beasts in the ditch