Quotes About Civilization

But if we keep doing politics the way we're doing politics, and we keep doing climate action the way we're doing climate action, we will not have a history that judges us because we, certainly as a civilization, won't be here.

The most celebrated system of jurisprudence known to the world begins, as it ends, with a Code.

Law is just one public institution, but it is a cornerstone of society. When law goes, everything goes.

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

I have a huge interest in ancient Egyptian times and the mummies and the kings and all that.

Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.

No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.

has a...civilized look.  Maybe because I know just beyond are highways

As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.

Progress makes purses out of human skin.

It's interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.

The congenital weakness of nineteenth century society was not that it was industrial but that it was a market society. Industrial civilization will continue to exist when the Utopian experiment of a self-regulating market will be no more than a memory.

The habit of looking at the last ten thousand years as well as at the array of early societies as a mere prelude to the true history of our civilization which started approximately with the publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, is, to say the least, out of date.

What we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself

The book is a new philosophy of politics and of history, and an examination of the principles of democratic reconstruction. It also tries to contribute to an understanding of the totalitarian revolt against civilization, and to show that this is as old as our democratic civilization itself.

The book offers an explanatory hypothesis for the persistent hostility to the open society. Totalitarian ideologies are interpreted as reactions to what is described as the strain of civilization, or the sense of drift which is associated with the transition from the closed tribal societies of the past to the individualistic civilization that originated in Athens in the fifth century B.C.

The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with with words and ideas instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions.

If our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men.

The cult of the individual is killing us. I think Twitter signals the death of western civilisation, but people have been saying that since Demosthenes.

Francisca recognized that she was decoding an entire process, detail by detail. She was learning a certain alphabet, a geography, a language which would become a revelation. This compelled her to stay. There were artifacts everywhere. She was assembling a lost civilization. When she viewed it in its entirety, she would become someone else.

jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collase

And to-day how could a man think whole-heartedly of mechanism, even though it was his proper and satisfactory job, when by walking a mile or two and crawling down a hole, he could get in touch with lost civilisations and the thought-mechanism of complex human beings?

They wanted to forget that there ever had been, in Europe, any other civilization at all. There was so much beauty they had not made, so many books they had not written, so many records of wars in which they had not fought, and so many ideas of human behavior which were anathema to them.

Funny the things which civilization has to offer when one misses. Flooring is a lovely thing. Gives one confidence. During my five weeks' occupancy the mud floor stayed wet in spite of great care on my part not to slop the water again. It never did properly dry, because the hut was necessarily dark. No direct sun came in, and the humidity was so terrific that even in direct sunlight nothing ever dried out. Curious to live on a slippery surface. A floor is a very important item.