Quotes About Civilization

The decline of the baths was due more directly to the fall of Rome than to the rise of Christianity, but there is no denying that the three events—one apparently mundane, but close to the heart of Roman civilization, and two with vast, long-term consequences—were intertwined

Just as the Cleanliness Institute closed its doors in 1932, a casualty of the stalled economy, Aldous Huxley published his satire of a sanitized utopia, Brave New World. It's doubtful that Huxley, living in England, had heard of the Institute, although naturally enough there are parallels between its emphasis on indoctrination and social pressure and the vastly more extreme measures taken in the novel's odour- and germ-phobic future civilization.

How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

Toutes les civilisation sont déchues, mais les mode diffèrent : la déchéance orientale est passive; la déchéance occidentale, active. La faute de l'Orient déchu, c'est qu'il ne pense plus; celle de l'Occident déchu, qu'il pense trop, et mal. L'Orient dort sur des vérités; l'Occident vit dans des erreurs.

When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.

History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

He realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.

Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words.

In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

Enlarged sympathy with children was one of the chief contributions made by the Victorian English to real civilization.

Toate civiliza?iile care s-au dus de râp? au fost victima conjunc?iei letale dintre tic?lo?ie ?i ignoran??.

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE IS THE HUMAN RACE

She suspected that civilization had been invented to make more stories. And

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming

My argument is simple, which is, that for several thousand years in Western civilization, marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. Research is overwhelming that children need mothers and fathers.

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

So if we assume we are not the only civilisation in the galaxy, then at least a few others must have arisen billions of years ahead of us. But where are they?

To me, and to the participants of at the Green Bank conference, the idea that a civilization might destroy itself is both ludicrous and likely. We are pathetically inadequate at long-term planning, idiotically primitive in our destructive urges and pathologically incapable of simply getting along.

Lucy was little more than an upright chimpanzee; an animal, a genetic survival machine. We bring art, science, literature and meaning to the Earth; we are a world away, and yet separated by the blink of an eye.

The giants had been brought to all these cities to accomplish mighty feats of industry for the Rephaim. The purpose had been to glorify the gods and build an empire of power for the pantheon. But it had all gotten out of control. Now, the entire civilization was in jeopardy of collapsing. The giants were large, strong, warrior-like, and organized. They appointed leaders to press their demands upon the Rephaim rulers of all the cities. Revolution seemed inevitable.