Quotes About Civilization

There's a film that I wrote that I want to do called 'The Grey,' which is about a group of pipeline workers in Alaska flying back into civilization after being remote for a number of months. The 737 they're on goes down, and they begin to be hunted by a pack of rogue wolves.

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?

The Indians are a civilization wrought with culture and a beautiful, deep spirituality.

We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

Ten thousand years from now our civilization will have passed without leaving a trace. A new race of people will inhabit the earth. They will come to Mount Rushmore and read the record we have made.

If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

I've begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

What I needed and actually need is a discipline of tradition, which is lacking in our civilization. Discipline of tradition and the ceremony of humbleness.

Take seriously the traditions, the Christian roots, and all the values that are the basis of the civilisation of Europe.

Civilisations which get cut off from their traditions and values do not survive for long.

The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid.

'The Last Pictures' is meant to create a framework to think about the long-term effects of human civilizations and the transformations we've made to the world around us. Having said that, every person in the world would have done the project differently, so in that sense, I guess it bears my creative stamp.

China's many nationalities need only to be transformed into the Chinese nation and to make it a highly civilized nation; then the nationalization process will be completed.

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

I'm an Australian. And I'm speaking generally here, but Australians in general aren't patriotic or nationalistic. Our country was built by immigrants. So, by my experience, I've seen the way immigration has transformed nations. They are the key people who quite literally build civilizations, be it culturally or musically.

Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.

Seoul promises to make a big investment in the transition of ecology and civilization that will transform the green crisis into a green opportunity.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

The forces that are in play on climate change essentially revolve around the generation of power, the transportation of goods and services and people, and the sorts of materials that we use to fuel the whole of our civilisation.

Be brave but not stupid. Walk humble, instead of puffed out with pride. Be unafraid but not careless or casual. It is the highest level of civilization when you realize that you are connected to others, and you live your life not just for yourself, but for one another

Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.

Selling rock is the best way I know to get a good look at human nature on the flip side, down and desperate, with none of the fake bullshit that's supposed to make us civilized.