Quotes About Civilization

Se é isto que a civilização tem para oferecer ao homem, então mil vezes o estado selvagem, a nudez e os uivos, mil vezes viver no deserto e na brenha, no covil e na caverna, em vez de trucidado pela máquina e pelo Abismo!

La raza humana está condenada a hundirse cada vez más en la noche primitiva antes de recomenzar algún día un nuevo ascenso sangriento hacia la civilización.

El trabajo de hombre es efímero y se desvanece como la espuma del mar... Así se desvaneció nuestra civilización grandiosa y colosal.

Humanity is old, civilization new: the mesh of cogs is by no means smooth — and this is as it should be. Never should a man enter a building of glass or metal, or a spaceship, or a submarine, without a small shock of astonishment; never should he avoid an act of passion without a small sense of effort …

might have been the people which left ruins on the Fomalhaut planets, or the Hexadelts, or whoever carved Monument Cliff on Xi Puppis X.

Most empires of conquest in history have imposed their own civilisation on the conquered... By comparison the Mongols trod lightly on the world they conquered.

By comparison with the terrifying acts of civilized armies of the era, the Mongols did not inspire fear by the ferocity or cruelty of their acts so much as by the speed and efficiency with which they conquered and their seemingly total disdain for the lives of the rich and powerful.

The myth of the pioneer family or lone frontiersman venturing into virgin forest to hack out a meager homestead is belied by the thoroughly organized commercial value of such ventures. The main figure in the settlement of the west was the land company, which frequently operated not only on the edge of civilization but on the edge of legality as well.

Jack Weatherford

Jack Weatherford

These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilisation which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. That is the failure of the New World cultures, dying in their own symbolic Ice Age.

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilisation is not a collection of finished artefacts, it is the elaboration of processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action.

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism.

If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.

Blackmail is the only refuge of the literate man against barbarism.

the fundamental fact that law directs the ongoing of society. It is rooted in the past, determines the present, and protects the future.

We all hurt other people, especially those we love...civilized people were the ones who had learned to hurt according to rules.

Humans are smarter now than they were 40,000 years ago.

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

The moral authority in the Western world is gone. And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record--everybody's record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you're doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call now, waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything.

I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilisation. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now - in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life - expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.