Quotes About Civilization

Events of future history will be of the same nature - or nearly so - as the history of the past, so long as men are men.

The Athenians were the first to lay aside their weapons, and to adopt an easier and more luxurious mode of life;

had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote antiquity

but of a large part of the barbarian world

The complexity of the society we have created for ourselves envelops us so completely that, instead of being dizzied, we take it for granted.

cancer was essentially unheard of in populations eating their traditional diets. Even the mid-Victorian English did not suffer greatly from cancer (Figure 16.7 on page 324). That is why cancer is considered to be a disease of 'civilization'.

A conscience is the price of morality, and morality is the price of civilization.

Civilizations never start off as civilizations. Like Sumer, Egypt sprouted from a cluster of river settlements. Sumer had the Tigris and Euphrates, and Egypt had the Nile.

most of the inhabitants of Dirt were crowded into a pawful of major cities, while most of the surfaces of the main land masses were barely inhabited at all.

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

How different conditions would be today in the Middle East, how much saner and safer the entire earth might be, had those Christians not defiled a civilization too advanced for their arrogant little minds to understand.

In school you learn that it is the thumb that separates human beings from the lower primates. The thumb is an evolutionary triumph. Because of his thumbs, man can use tools; because he can use tools he can extend his senses, control his environment and increase in sophistication and power. The thumb is the cornerstone of civilization!

When civilized people dance they reconnect with their old animal nature. It reminds them that they aren't mechanical chess pieces or rooted trees, but free-flowing meat waves of possibility.

The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it.

Wasn't it made clear that civilization is not an end in itself but a theater or gymnasium in which the evolving individual finds facilities for practice?

The law is designed to help us live. It has no other justification. If it cannot do that, if it operates only theoretically, the law will fail us." Senator Stevens stares

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. —Karl Popper, philosopher of science (1902-94)

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this.

I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive.

No way can be found in this boasted land of civilization and Christianity to punish the perpetrators of this bloody and monstrous Crime," Grant lamented of Colfax. "The spirit of hatred and violence is stronger than law.

country that doesn't grow its own wine grapes has no claim to civilisation.

How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.