Quotes About Civilization

But I won't watch them go to war again. I've been to war, you know, to save civilization from the reptile hordes. I bled for it, I saw friends and other men die for it. And then I watched men like you piss it away again, the civilization we'd saved, in squabbles over a few hundred square miles of territory and what language the people get to speak there, what color their skin and hair is and what kind of religious horseshit they get crammed down their throats.

They went wild. I raised my eyes to their faces in the gloom and saw the thin skin of civilization stripped away, the rage laid out like raw flesh beneath.

They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy.

Oh yes, we Londoners pretend to be all civilized and cultured, a beacon to the world, but it's all lies. We're rotten.

If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?

But people don't on the whole fart raucously in Mozart [concerts]. So I suppose a few vestiges of the thin crust of civilization which prevents our descent into utter barbarism are just about holding. ~Vigilance, by Julian Barnes

He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture.

Indeed I have begun in this fashion, and place great importance on this opening chapter, for unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows unconvincing and paradoxical.

Louis de Bourbon and his right hands Cardinal Mazarin and Jean-Louis Colbert transformed France, particularly the city of Paris, into a haven for civilized society, a refuge for the arts, a gastronomic mecca for gourmands. That is what Georges-Guillaume Damas wanted to do for Gabon in Africa.

Only man has turned away from the law of survival of the fittest, taken up the weak and ailing, and guaranteed their right to survival. So heroes perish, but the weak live on. One measure of a civilisation, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society. There's even a political scientist (anonymous) who claims that our modern age is an age of the patient, by the patient, for the patient.

There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.

Indeed, jealousy is an animal feeling, capable even of rising to murder. There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.

They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.

Ashoka's dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace.

The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area).

as the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."24

The Rhineland cities were developing the market economy that would eventually replace agrarian civilization; they were therefore in the very early stages of modernization, a transition that always strains social relations.

Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.

philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place.

Women provide the only true link to civilization. Men simply are not ruthless enough to survive on their own.

A perfectly normal person is rare in our civilization.

he bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

It would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expedience of capital punishment could be founded in a society glorying in its civilization.