Quotes About Civilization

Instinctive happiness, or joy of life, is one of the most important widespread popular goods that we have lost through industrialism and the high pressure at which most of us live; its commonness in China is a strong reason for thinking well of Chinese civilization.

The old primitive passions, which civilization has denied, surge up all the stronger for repression. In a moment imagination and instinct travel back through the centuries, and the wild man of the woods emerges from the mental prison in which he has been confined. This is the deeper part of the psychology of the war fever.

I believe that, owning to men's folly, a world-government will only be established by force, and will therefore be at first cruel and despotic. But I believe that it is necessary for the preservation of a scientific civilization, and that, if once realized, it will gradually give rise to the other conditions of a tolerable existence.

The soul is not dead, but silent, the wisdom not lacking, but of such simplicity as to be counted non-existent in the tinker's mind of modern civilization.

The Internet does not have a reputation as being a particularly civilized place.

When I'm not writing, I do a lot of research reading on the shape of civilization. Fiction can be a lot of different things... but I feel like it's my job to write about the way things are.

All the forms of civil polity have been tried by mankind, except one, and that seems to have been reserved in Providence to be realized in America.

I have this feeling that as time goes on, we're not getting any more civilized, and we should be. We're still running around like the days of Genghis Khan. There are so many important, better things to do and we need to encourage people to reach into the brighter side of humanity and not encourage people to continue to glorify the darker side.

Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money.

The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation.

We are fascinated with our own history, and we are fascinated with the Romans because they were millennia ago, and yet they still capture our imagination because they were actually so similar to us. They were very civilized. They had a very similar political system.

the compartmentalization of the moral sense, and the distribution of belief and enforcement among different sectors of a population, can lead to ideologically driven wars and genocides even in otherwise civilized societies.

progreso» no guiado por el humanismo no es progreso.

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. This trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking.

If civilization may be defined as that stage of human life at which, objectively, the body becomes a problem, then our moment of civilization may be described as that stage at which we are subjectively aware of, and feel trapped by, this problem. Now we aspire to the life of the body and we reject the ascetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity, but we are still confined in the generalized sensibility which that religious tradition bequeathed us.

Susan Sontag Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57. Also What's Happening in America (1966) The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history

Whether V. be the eternal feminine of Goethe or the great Goddess of Graves, symptom or cause of the chaos of the twentieth century, blighter or ghastly redeemer of the waste land, Western Civilization, as Pynchon sees it, is caught in a dying fall. Randomly dispersed natural energies, creeping inanimateness, rampant colonialism and racism, expiring romanticism, perverted sexuality, degenerate politics, and holocaustic wars have turned the Western world into a waste land.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

He despised violence. He believed he was smarter than that, better than that. A civilized man. After seeing Martin Pink in the flesh again—he knew just how thin the veneer of civilization was.

Every divorce is a unique tragedy because every divorce brings an end to a unique civilization—one built on thousands of shared experiences, memories, hopes, and dreams. E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly, For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered

By infinitely multiplying this necessity to conform, at the expense of developing the individual, unique 'self,' society succeeds in making a man 'good.' By frustrating his potential in numberless ways from the time he is born till the time he dies, civilization instills in him a pattern which is so rigid that he is often unable to express his true self at all.

The proverbs of a nation furnish the index to its spirit and the results of its civilization.

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented.

Las religiones fundan las civilizaciones, que a su vez mueren cuando apostatan de la religión que las fundó