Quotes About Civilization

Give me civilization. I don't want to be pampered.

What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.

There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.

The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind.

Modern war and modern civilisation are utterly incompatible...one or the other must go.

The downfall of civilized states tends to come not from the direct assaults of foes, but from internal decay combined with the consequences of exhaustion in war.

Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life.

The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

War is, we have been forced to admit, even in the face of its huge place in our civilization, an asocial trait.

There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.

We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.

The biggest farce of man's history has been the argument that wars are fought to save civilization.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

His insights have come to him through a crack in the veneer of civilization, which was also a crack in his own soul. He had the courage to look in this direction.

What was it he sensed beneath the charm of Adelaide's wide ordered streets, grand Georgian and Victorian buildings and symmetrical leafy green squares? It is variously known as the Garden City, the City of Churches, the Athens of the South, the jewel in the national crown of arts and sciences. A city, above all, cultured and civilised. But when Salman Rushdie watched night fall in Adelaide, it was not a soft velvet cloak of harmony that he saw descend on this city.

Kurzweil and other transhumanists contend that we are fast approaching a "technological singularity," a point at which AI far surpasses human intelligence and is capable of solving problems we weren't able to solve before, with unpredictable consequences for civilization and human nature.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Someone had to make sure that farmers, who grew more grain than their families needed, would sell food to the nonfarmers (the basketmakers, leatherworkers, and carpenters) who grew no grain themselves. Only in an inhospitable and wild place is this sort of bureaucracy—the true earmark of civilization—needed. In genuinely fertile places, overflowing with water and food and game and minerals and timber, people generally don't bother.3

Civilization began in the Fertile Crescent, not because it was an Edenic place overflowing with natural resources, but because it was so hostile to settlement that a village of any size needed careful management to survive.