Quotes About Civilization

I learned there [in Mostar] that the distance between civilization and savagery is exceedingly small and this has scared me ever since.

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.

I wanted to put my hand to an enormous paean which would unify my vision of America with words spilled out in the modern spontaneous method. Instead of just a horizontal account of travels on the road, I wanted a vertical, metaphysical study. ... This feeling may soon be obsolete as America enters its High Civilization period and no one will get sentimental or poetic any more about trains and dew on fences at dawn in Missouri.

Life was dense, dark, ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it.

They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they though civilisation could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.

It's the beat generation. It's the begát. It's the beat to keep. It's the beat in the heart. It's being beat and down in the world and like old time low down. And like an ancient civilization, the slave boatman rowing galleys to a beat.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization.

Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society.

Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged.

Then arises the third and inexorable question: If Civilisation has increased the producing power of the average man, why has it not bettered the lot of the average man? There can be one answer only—MISMANAGEMENT.

Radical multicultural types will, in the end, destroy the things they claim to like, because they don't understand that liberty and reasonable equality are features of stable, free, conservative societies based on Christian ideas, which guard their borders and are proud of their civilisation.

The 5th Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.

Our civilizations have evolved. The solutions we can find for the things that keep us somewhat primitive and base and ugly in our desires can improve and become more sophisticated. Sometimes there's a disconnect between that. My car can drive, but we can't get rid of violence.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles... respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law... or, in a word justice.

Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.

If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony.

Responsibility has become the fundamental imperative in modern civilization, and it should be an unavoidable criterion to assess and evaluate human actions, including, in a special way, development activities.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order —in short, of government.

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.