Quotes About Civilization

Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.

Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.

Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.

I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive

Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.

Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive.

In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

Yes, I am, but I'm also referring to certain white men in suits. It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery.

The total number of living humans was now sixteen.

Men were drawn to civilization; only the most severe ascetic among them relished isolation. Penitent hermits craved seclusion. Being away from the squalor of humanity was an integral part of their spiritual monasticism. They could talk more readily to God in the silence of their mountaintop cave or their desert isolation. It was easier to believe that the voice you heard responding to your queries issued from a divine trumpet if there were no other souls nearby. But he was a soldier.

Our use of knowledge progresses through successively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God

It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery.

Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow, and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth," T.R. said, "it wouldn't undo what we've done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.

What are we going to do about it is the question." "We, as a civilization? About global climate change?" "I know, right? Too vague! Too much diffusion of responsibility. Too much politics.

It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

The difference between human cultures and the civilizations of Highly Evolved Beings is that HEBs actually apply the law of reciprocity in their lives, rather than just giving it lip service.

Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.

Consider this pronouncement, inscribed on an Assyrian tablet circa 2800 B.C.: Our earth is degenerate these days . . . bribery and corruption abound, children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

I long for a civilization to develop a level of science literacy, so that we can become better shepherds of our future on this planet.

Starry Messenger is a wake-up call to civilization. People no longer know who or what to trust. We sow hatred of others fueled by what we think is true, or what we want to be true, without regard to what is true. Cultural and political factions battle for the souls of communities and of nations. We've lost all sight of what distinguishes facts from opinions. We're quick with acts of aggression and slow with acts of kindness.

Our Society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It's an inevitability tourists can't help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?