Quotes About Civilization

Coal, oil and natural gas have lit homes and powered machinery for centuries, driving civilization forward. But as human development accelerated, the unsustainability of such energy became apparent.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky said that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.

The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?

Yes, I'm a man and everyone knows men are great hairy beasts scarcely tamed by civilization -Jermyn, Duke of Northcliff to Amy, Princess Beaumontaigne

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.

It is supposed to be an axiom of Western civilization that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as order.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers.

History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality tale.

believers fight each other over the correct interpretation and even kill members of their own faiths in battles over doctrine. Civilization has been immensely retarded by such arcane interfaith quarrels and could now be destroyed by their modern versions.

Sir Steven Runciman, whose history of the Crusades is an imperishable work, because it demonstrates that medieval Christian fundamentalism not only constituted a menace to Islamic civilization but also directly resulted in the sack of Byzantium, the retardation of Europe, and the massacre of the Jews.

God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

The curse of Abraham continues to poison Hebron, but the religious warrant for blood sacrifice poisons our entire civilization.

if he had said otherwise. To admit that a thermonuclear catastrophe would be the end of civilization and of the biosphere would be, in religious terms, profane and defeatist. All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and

one of the great failures of human civilization has been its refusal to pay proper attention, or a proper wage, to those who perform the hard but essential primary task of growing our food.

The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case.

However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of "progress," in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection.

Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it has become a threat to human survival.

Dios no creó al ser humano a su imagen y semejanza. Evidentemente, fue al revés, lo cual constituye la sencilla explicación para toda esta profusión de dioses y religiones y para la lucha fratricida, tanto entre cultos distintos como en el seno de cada uno de ellos, que se desarrolla continuamente a nuestro alrededor y que tanto ha retrasado el progreso de la civilización.

A nation whose civilization is rooted in Christianity will therefore always be at pains to preserve Christianity as the basis of its civilization and to discourage foreign elements in its cultural life. So long as the Jews fail to appreciate this fact they will come up against difficulties.…

This is not a small thing. You may not realize this, but the majority of the tacit knowledge that builds civilizations, the stuff that maybe isn't sexy but is foundational knowledge, has actually been lost. Why? Because no one wrote it down. They just passed it on by word of mouth.