Quotes About Civilization

Charles C. Mann

Like all too many dictators, Cahokia's rulers focused on maintaining their hold over the people, paying little attention to external reality. By 1350 A.D. the city was almost empty. Never again would such a large Indian community exist north of Mexico.

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks

They also carried on commerce with other nations. All this clearly shows, as Heer has remarked, that they had at this early age progressed considerably in civilisation; and this again implies a long continued previous period of less advanced civilisation, during which the domesticated animals, kept by different tribes in different districts, might have varied and given rise to distinct races.

Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment's lost attention, and it's all gone, crashed to ruination, shards in the dirt. Then mankind retreats to the caves, leaving little behind but obelisks weathering to nubs like broken teeth, dissolving to beach sand.

Inhuman, V says. But that's an easy word. We've been doing that sort of thing to each other all through history, back past the Pyramids. Humans are inhuman, whether it's by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilise, and then burn the world? There is a March of Science. But who shall beat the drums, for its retreat?

Wherever Mohammedanism has taken root, it has led at first to rapid and enthusiastic outbursts of vigor, but it seems gradually to sap the energy of the nations which adopt it, and leads, after a

when brought into contact with the empire, picked up all the vices of its decaying civilisation without losing those of his original barbarism. It is not without some reason that the doings of Gaiseric have left their mark on the history of language in the shape of the modern word ' Vandalism.

The empire of the Pharaohs was old before Rome was a twinkling in Odysseus's eye, wise before China had been discovered, and over and done with before our founding fathers came down from Mount Olympus to give us the Bible and the US Constitution—

Yet how did they know to preserve their dead for thousands of years without cryonic suspension? And how did they build their giant pyramids, made out of stone blocks bigger and heavier than shipping containers, quarried from mountains hundreds of miles from the Valley of the Kings?" Obviously, Mary noted, empires that endured for thousands of years couldn't possibly have achieved anything notable without the helpful guidance of interstellar white saviors—

Autarchies had been shattered, hermit kingdoms destroyed. Almost a billion had died in war, plague, starvation, and madness. But worse was yet to come, as what passed for civilization on this world guttered and faded beneath the penumbra of a darkness deeper than eternal night.

Possibly that's what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence.

When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others--using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers.

Permanent War One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun. —REINHOLD NIEBUHR, Beyond Tragedy

The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth.

Collapse created a dreamworld "where men live fighting one another about elaborate shadows and quarreling for power, as if that were a great prize."116 Once caught up in the frenzied Danse Macabre, it became impossible to escape until, as it always does, death worked its dark magic, dooming a once vibrant civilization to extinction.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

A monument's dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated.

We can no better imagine what will be happening on the moon 500 years from now than Columbus could imagine contemporary Manhattan. Except to say that it will be a place familiar to billions of people.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

I can understand better than most the contradiction between the idealistic civilisation and religious morals of Europe and what they did with the slaves, because the root of the evil is only two generations away from me. Maybe this has fed my need to fight against the abuses of modern civilisation.

In Winston Churchill's words: We owe London to Rome.34

because women were also believed to be closer to the raw forces of nature than were males, controlling their power was, for the adult male, part of the larger project of creating human civilization itself.