Quotes About Civilization

Cold love's the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.

If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately one million trillion, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived!.

We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives—to being clean, warm, and well fed—that we forget how recent most of that is. In fact, achieving these things took forever, and then they mostly came in a rush.

H. L. Mencken called it "the one authentic rectum of civilization," but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic. In 1927, the iconic sign on the hillside above the city actually said HOLLYWOODLAND. It had been erected in 1923 to advertise a real estate development and had nothing to do with motion pictures. The letters, each over forty feet high, were in those days also traced out with electric lights. (The LAND was removed in 1949.)

Out of all the incursions, the only permanent one so far is the present one, and that dates from just twelve thousand years ago, which means that Britain is actually one of the more recent places in the world to become inhabited by modern people. In this sense it is much younger than the Americas or Australia. The

Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history

It shows that for most of its recent history Earth has been nothing like the stable and tranquil place that civilization has known, but rather has lurched violently between periods of warmth and brutal chill.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.

at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.

we know more about how ancient Greeks and Romans sat or reclined than we do about the English of eight hundred years ago.

Farming was independently invented at least seven times—in China, the Middle East, New Guinea, the Andes, the Amazon basin, Mexico, and West Africa.

All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I'd left my hometown only ten years earlier, wasn't vociferating the opinions of anybody. My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization. Being true to yourself, that was the thing.

The Donner Party is key because it's a study of group dynamics or rather, how group dynamics don't work. Few of us understand how quickly the veneer of civilization can be torn away from people.

I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles, he said. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.

Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people.

our journey through the empire of cotton has shown that civilization and barbarity are linked at the hip

It was as if a complex, sophisticated society of fifteen million people simply walked away from their lives one day and never came back, leaving nothing but deserted cities and abandoned architectural masterpieces in their wake.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.

Culture is not enough, even though nothing is enough without culture.

No one society and no one age of it realises all the values of civilisation. Not all of these values may be compatible with each other: what is at least as certain is that in realising some we lose the appreciation of others.

Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History

Assule went on and on about the civilization that had been here first. It could have been very interesting if he hadn't managed to make it so boring. I don't know how he did it, actually. Some latent talent for sending everyone droad, I suppose.