Quotes About Civilization

Though it would appear that Americans grow less knowledgeable by the day, there are still many American schoolchildren who recognize the Roman Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon, the Tower of London. From Africa, only the great pyramids of Egypt enjoy such broad recognition, and they are popularly and wrongly attributed to a civilization not spawned from Africa's interior.

In his book Black Spark, White Fire, historian Richard Poe makes a case that black Egyptians were among the first philosophers and explorers, traveling as far from Egypt as Russia and turning up with the Romans at Troy.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries.

Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?

Most important, the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high-level paradigm shift, the next level of indirection.

GEORGE 2048: We like to think of it as one civilization.

Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our brains each limited to 10^16 to 10^19 cps, imagine what our future civilization in 2099 with its 10^60 cps will be capable of thinking and doing?

The taiga provides wonderful opportunities for truly long-distance expeditions into areas that are incredibly remote from civilisation. The spiritual reward of such journeys can prove to be transcendental,

The point is that our difference from beasts is wall to wall, permeating every moment of our day.

What 'Deadwood' did was to talk about how capitalism started, how civilised society came in, and how that brought its own problems.

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.

If you ask me what is civilisation, it's little more than an act of faith.

I must say I have a personal love affair with India, with its civilisation, its culture.

Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization.

No matter where we are or how advanced we think we are, there are elemental issues of our civilization that stories help us work through.

From first to last the civilization of America has been bound up with its physical environment.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

I'm particularly drawn to actors in their own little drama. I find it's that area I'm very alive to. And I don't encounter it that often. You have to be far from civilization, you have to be far from New York or London to find people who do that.

Africa has a time-honored and brilliant civilization.

It's quite possible that the end of us will not be the end of the Earth. Even if we really screw things up and things go badly for us and our civilization, the Earth is pretty resilient.