Quotes About Civilization

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

The more civilized, the more conscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature. Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work.

It is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems; they are the dubious gift of civilization. It is just man's turning away from instinct—his opposing himself to instinct—that creates consciousness.

Civilized life today demands concentrated, directed conscious functioning, and this entails the risk of a considerable dissociation from the unconscious. The further we are able to remove ourselves from the unconscious through directed functioning, the more readily a powerful counterposition can build up in the unconscious, and when this breaks out it may have disagreeable consequences.

Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature.

In fact, the terrors that stem from our elaborate civilization may be far more threatening than those that primitive people attribute to demons. The

On the contrary, every civilized human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages going back even to the reptilian age, so the human psyche is a product of evolution which, when followed back to its origins, shows countless archaic traits.

in our civilized life, we have stripped so many ideas of their emotional energy, we do not really respond to them any more. We

Although our civilized consciousness has separated itself from the instincts, the instincts have not disappeared; they have merely lost their contact with consciousness.

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.

Civilized man ... is in danger of losing all contact with the world of instinct- a danger that is still further increased by his living an urban existence in what seems to be a purely man-made environment. This loss of instinct is largely responsible for the pathological condition of contemporary culture.

The opening up of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering; it is as when a flourishing civilization is abandoned to invading hordes of barbarians, or when fertile fields are exposed by the bursting of a dam to a raging torrent.

El público culto -flor y nata de nuestra civilización actual- hállase un tanto separado de sus raíces y en vías de perder su conexión con la tierra.

In earlier ages, as instinctive concepts welled up in the mind of man, his conscious mind could no doubt integrate them into a coherent psychic pattern. But the "civilized" man is no longer able to do this. His "advanced" consciousness has deprived itself of the means by which the auxiliary contributions of the instincts and the unconscious can be assimilated. These organs of assimilation and integration were numinous symbols, held holy by common consent.

Belief in dogma is an equally unavoidable stop-gap which must sooner or later be replaced by adequate understanding and knowledge if our civilization is to continue.

Man has developed consciousness slowly and laboriously, in a process that took untold ages to reach the civilized state (which is arbitrarily dated from the invention of script in about 4000 B.C.). And this evolution is far from complete, for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded in darkness. What we call the "psyche" is by no means identical with our consciousness and its contents.

This attitude contrasts strangely with the still commoner and more striking idealization of the past, which is praised not merely as the "good old days" but as the Golden Age—and not just by uneducated and superstitious people, but by all those legions of theosophical enthusiasts who resolutely believe in the former existence and lofty civilization of Atlantis.

a Nean derthal with a badge.

Archaeologists are the people who try to fill in the gaps of history by studying the material remains of ancient cultures. It's archaeologists

While we are quick to judge the human rights record of every other country on earth, it is we civilized Americans whose murder rate is ten times that of other Western nations, we civilized Americans who kill women and children with the most alarming frequency. In

De geschiedenis van de holocaust zit onder de vingerafdrukken van de moderniteit, van de maakbare maatschappij

Anthropologists describe tools as a cultural artifact.

It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it's people who are not willing to hurt other people because the other people are different.