Quotes About Civilization

Christianity probably has been the most important institution in the world in the last 2000 years. It has achieved more for western civilisation than has any other factor; it has helped far more people than it has harmed.

When Curzon was rash enough to say that 'all civilisation has been the work of aristocracies', Churchill retorted, 'The upkeep of aristocracies has been the hard work of all civilisations

History started badly and hav been getting steadily worse.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

World history is a court of judgment

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force

Westward the course of empire takes its way;The four first acts already past,A fifth shall close the drama with the day:Time's noblest offspring is the last.

On ne comprends rien à la civilisation moderne, si l'on n'admet pas d'abord qu'elle est une conspiration universelle contre toute espèce de vie intérieure.

We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way

It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.

We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket.

A disquieting era of genetic manipulation is coming, one that may revolutionize human capacities, and notions of health. If we treat moral scruples impatiently, as inherently retrograde in a scientifically advancing civilization, we will not be in moral trim when, soon, our very humanity depends on our being in trim.

Europe was barbaric in the sixteenth century, as the self-certainty of Christianity fueled the first conquests. Europe passed into civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then collapsed into decadence in the course of the twentieth century. The United States is just beginning its cultural and historical journey.

Europe was barbaric in the sixteenth century, as the self-certainty of Christianity fueled the first conquests. Europe passed into civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then collapsed into decadence in the course of the twentieth century.

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

He cut right through the layers of civilization, politeness, and social snobbery to some preternatural female sense that said, "Dominant male. Danger. Power. Sex." Why

Barbarism usually produces swift death. Cruelty is the mark of a civilized human.

The shaman whirled and twisted, his movements born from the grace and speed of a hunter closing on its prey, wild and strangely primal, as if every layer of civilization had been ripped away from him and what remained was a creature, fruit of the planet that birthed it, as timeless as life itself. It was impossible to look away.

Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.

As a matter of fact, no other language in the world has received such praise as the Lithuanian language. The garlands of high honour have been taken to Lithuanian people for inventing, elaborating, and introducing the most highly developed human speech with its beautiful and clear phonology. Moreover, according to comparative philology, the Lithuanian language is best qualified to represent the primitive Aryan civilization and culture.

The greatest evil that can oppress civilized peoples derives from wars, not, indeed, so much from actual present or past wars, as from the never-ending and constantly increasing arming for future war.

Since the human race's natural end is to make steady cultural progress, its moral end is to be conceived as progressing toward the better. And this progress may well be occasionally interrupted, but it will never be broken off.