Quotes About Civilization

the average citizens, the backbone of the civilization. These were the ones Enoch felt were exploited at the expense of this class warfare for power. The society appeared to be an advancement of civilization, but Enoch believed it moved toward the inevitable centralization of power into the hands of the elite priestly caste, of which he was one. It remained a point of cognitive dissonance for him.

It's so much more interesting to study a ... damaged world. I find it difficult to learn anything in a place that's too civilized.

The expectations of civilized society should afford all the protection a person needs. But that armor is rendered as thin as a tissue when one is dealing with the uncivilized. -Bene Gesserit Archives

Without wonder, there's no progress. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. If you don't exercise your capacity for wonder... well, use it or lose it. A civilization without wonder is a civilization that's starting to atrophy and die.

Enkidu never should've killed the guardian of the forest. He should've joined him. That's what too much civilizing does to you.

It'd be kind of silly if we killed ourselves off after all this time. If we do, we're stupider than the cave people and I don't think we are. I think we're just exactly as stupid and that's pretty bright in the long run.

So acts every 'man-in-the-street' in our own society, so has acted the average member of any society through the past ages, and so acts the present-day savage; and the lower his level of cultural development, the greater stickler he will be for good manners, propriety and form, and the more incomprehensive and odious to him will be the non-conforming point of view.

As with . . . even the written word, the remote overview is one more wrenched perspective that developing civilization has glued, collagelike, to the once unified experience of life.

Perceptive observers saw civilization thinned to a mere veneer, with barbarism surging just beneath the surface, straining for release.

Our ancestors recognized the importance of connectedness and the toxicity of exclusion. The history of the "civilized" world, on the other hand, is filled with policies and practices that favored disconnection and marginalization—that destroyed family, community, and culture.

Estamos viviendo una época apasionante, ya que la ciencia está a punto de desintegrar los viejos mitos y de reescribir una creencia básica de la civilización humana.

When the real history of the world is written, it will show god's dealings with men, and the place the gospel has played in the rise and fall of nations.

we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

The internet, although beloved by all including Al Qaeda, went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever encountering a civilisation. It was never utopian, although it was free. Its lawyers are patent trolls. Its political parties are flash mobs in the streets. Its wealthy are nouveau-rich cranks. Its poor are a tidal wave of Third World young people. The Twenty-Teens are quite an interesting cultural period.

Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.

Civilisation is a conspiracy. What value would your police be if every criminal could find a sanctuary across the Channel, or your law courts, if no other tribunal recognised their decisions? Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences. And it will succeed till the day comes when there is another compact to strip them bare.

Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.

Suppose that the links in the cordon of civilisation were neutralised by other links in a far more potent chain. The earth is seething with incoherent power and unorganised intelligence.

Oh, it sounds ridiculous, I know, in Britain in the twentieth century, but I learned in the war that civilization anywhere is a very thin crust.

Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break.

Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in.

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.

The term 'Savage' is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed, when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.

He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent— those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations