Quotes About Civilization

You can tell the state of civilization by the way people dress. If the people who fought two World Wars came back to 2010 and saw all of us running around in tracksuits, what would they think? It is just about being sloppy.

Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress. But all of them, or almost all of the wars, have been trade wars.

I love the Bronze Age - the age of the Trojan Wars and Helen of Troy. Contrary to what people think, Troy was a very sophisticated society and they used ostrich eggs - which have surprisingly tough shells - to store perfumed oils.

Wars, however frequent and destructive they may be, have never been able to kill entirely the intellectual and moral sense which raises man above the beast.

I leave to the militarists the difficult task of trying to explain to us how these wars have served to shape character or to promote the progress of civilization or to achieve the reign of justice on earth. So far, they have not come forward with the explanation.

Drugs," Estelle said. "Money and drugs, and that's the history of civilization.

W]e are all savages under the cloak that civilization fashions for us.

The inevitable, tragic corollary of civilization is populace.

I dare say that we are all savages under the cloak that civilization fashions for us.

Equality can only exist between equals. Civilization implies division of labor, division of labor implies subordination and subordination implies injustice and inequality.

A chair is the first thing you need when you don't really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.

Civilization depends on morality.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may will call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.

No hay en la historia universal obra comparable a la realizada por España, porque hemos incorporado a la civilización cristiana a todas las razas que estuvieron bajo nuestro influjo

Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

Greek civilization derived in its religion, its philosophy, its mathematics and much else, from the ancient civilizations of Africa above all from Egypt of the Pharaohs. To those 'founding fathers' in classical Greece, any notion that Africans were inferior, morally or intellectually, would have seemed silly. –Basil Davidson, Africa in History (1991)

In the animated Dreamworks movie Prince of Egypt the ancient Egyptians are drawn to appear more Arab than African. But the ancient Egyptians came originally from Africa's interior to the south. They were not Arabs, not people from Arabia, but indigenous Africans. Egyptian civilization was thousands of years old by the time the Arabs, with a modest army under General 'Amr ibn as- 'As, entered in December of 639 A.D.

Volney wrote that civilization had been first conceived "on the borders of the Upper Nile, among a black race of men.