Quotes About Civilization

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why

Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.

An animal will kill, but never to completely annihilate a race, a whole collectively. What does this make us in this world?

Depressing realization sets in. Writing was invented not by human beings but by accountants. Most of the early writing systems are records of how much crap people own, how much money they have, how much money they owe, and other lowering/boastful facts of human life.

You have to take the long view, Tom. It isn't only Traction Cities which poison the air and tear up the earth. All cities do that, static or mobile. It's human beings that are the problem. Everything that they do pollutes and destroys.

La religión católica representa, para la civilización europea, el arca de alianza, el cofre del viaje a través del tiempo en que se comprime todo el tesoro de su experiencia y sabiduría

I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.

I mention the need of cooperation and confidence among the men who work, no matter what may be their relative ranks, because it is the vital factor underlying everything. Only as we are willing to work today, work as we never have worked before, will civilization survive.

Our understanding of Shakespeare already depends largely on the vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; but the generations are bound together by the golden links of the great tradition of civilization.

The 'Middle Ages/Dark Ages' were of course no such thing. Achievement in the Arabian crescent was sensational then.

The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.

When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art.

That's how a nation's manners are going to be taught - from watching others' behavior and learning from the effects of that behavior.

the highly respected macroeconomist Jeffrey Sachs has recently made an impassioned and well-argued case in his book The Price of Civilization that mindfulness needs to be at the heart of any attempt to resolve the major problems we face as a country and, by implication, as a world.

he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community.

He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever running out.

Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace….The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.

Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.

in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Men will thank God on their knees, a hundred years from now, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, in a position to give leadership to the thought of the American people and direction to the activities of their government, in that dark hour when a powerful and ruthless barbarism threatened to overrun the civilization of the Western World.

we will turn this place around, and a new civilization can be born that does not know boundary lines but knows better how to live in the garden and knows that we are one thought away from paradise.

When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in. Absent a higher alternative, human nature drives us to make sense of the world on its own instinctual terms: That's tribalism.

To have a viable civilization, people have to have a benign government, a semblance of education, spare time, imagination, and manners

the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom.