Quotes About Civilization

In our civilization there are fearful times when the criminal law wrecks a man. How mournful the moment when society draws back and permits the irreparable loss of a sentient being.

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.

If an organization such as the Apparatus has the prime duty of undermining a civilization, it must be thorough. One must make the maximum amount of trouble for the maximum number of people for the minimum number of reasons. That rule holds good for governments, for governmental organizations and for government officers and agents.

Some instinct older than civilization was telling her to run, to flee. She didn't move.

Násilí se nikomu nevyplácí. S tím se m?že vysta?it jen krátkou dobu, ale d?jiny se jím psát nedají. žijeme v civilizovaném sv?t?, v Evrop?, ve dvacátém století

upon the civilization of the world. The best one can do is to estimate, as intelligently as possible, the national characteristics of the peoples engaged

Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.

Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?

He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.

Freud said that our unconscious drives or instincts, such as sex and aggression, are blocked from our conscious mind, that civilization doesn't want us to see them. Therefore, those drives are protected by such defences as repression, denial, and sublimation.

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.

I wanted to write about a postapocalyptic world where our civilization was not looked back on with awe and admiration, as it is in so many books of the genre, but disdained as the fuckwits we are, who wrecked a perfect biosphere because we couldn't be bothered not to.

Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does'?

All coral in every world think of Australia the way that you and I think of Mesopotamia - it is the ancestral paradise of their civilization and they send it Valentines each February.

cold glassy surface of reality. I saw the gentle bookish boy you must have been, made old with tedium, wasted effort, unacknowledged kindnesses. I saw the tired, struggling righteousness of you. You were starving for want of love. You were a delicate, civilised changeling, raised among barbarians and apemen.

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.

We observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though separately founded because remote from each other in time and space, keep these three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead.

And as if, finally, providence had not made provision for this human necessity: so that, lacking letters, all nations in their barbarous period were first founded on customs, and [only] later, having become civilized, were governed by [statutory] laws!

le persan Al-Sadjâssi, écrivait il y'a des siècles: Quand la sagesse est descendue des étages du ciel vers le centre de la terre, elle s'est établie en quatre gîtes et s'est installée en quatre demeures: dans le cerveau des grecs, sur la langue des arabes, dans la main des chinois et dans le cœur des perses.

We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years. We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of the peace—and, by 'we,' I mean all of us, the whole civilized human race.

are culture-vultures; but not in the way this phrase is usually used," as Stephen Hugh-Jones, a British anthropologist, explains. "For anthropologists 'culture' is not a matter of refinement of tastes or the intellectual side of civilization; it is the commonly-held ideas, beliefs and practices of any society of any kind.

Burton and his ilk also had a distinctive philosophy: they believed that science showed that Europeans and Americans were biologically, mentally, and socially superior to others. "The savage is morally and mentally an unfit instrument for the spread of civilization except when, like the higher mammalia, he is reduced to a state of slavery," wrote August Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers,

Nadie puede decir cuál habría sido nuestra historia si tanta tribu no hubiese sido aniquilada. Los españoles decían que debían civilizarnos, hacernos abandonar la barbarie. Pero ellos, con barbarie, nos dominaron, nos despoblaron. En pocos años hicieron más sacrificios humanos que nosotros en el tiempo largo que transcurrió desde las primeras festividades.

In that dark night which shrouds from our eyes the most remote antiquity, a light appears which cannot lead us astray; I speak of this incontestable truth: the social world is certainly the work of man.