Quotes About Civilization

The walking delegates of a higher civilization, who have nothing to divide, look upon the notion of property as a purely artificial creation of human society. According to these advanced philosophers, the time will come when no man shall be allowed to call anything his. The beneficent law which takes away an author's rights in his own books just at the period when old age is creeping upon him seems to me a handsome stride toward the longed-for millennium.

I love her still, for if you know anything about that kind of feeling, you know how close it is connected to hopelessness and thus is about the only thing in civilization that don't degenerate with time.

Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.

Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.

Is man's civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.

History is a great dust heap.

The rule of law bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault, but it re- mains the most civilized and least burdensome conception of a state yet to be devised. —Michael Oakeshott, 19831

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards.

People here always said to me, 'Why would you leave civilization to go to a place like Fiji?' Fiji is a far more civilized place than California or New York City.

No country could claim to be civilized if its legal system weren't available to everyone in it.

We would all love to walk up to someone and shoot them in the head, there's no doubt about that. We're too civilised to admit it, but we're happy to read about it.

I supposed the Red Guards had enjoyed themselves. Is it not true that we all possess some destructive tendencies in our nature? The veneer of civilization is very thin. Underneath lurks the animal in each of us. If I were young and had had a working class background, if I had been brought up to worship Mao and taught to believe him infalliable, would I not have behaved exactly as the Red Guards had done?

In Hobbes' memorable description, life outside society would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.

La humanidad está muy cerca del salvajismo y tiene que regirse por normas. De lo contrario, nos hundiríamos en nuestra propia naturaleza animal y pereceríamos.

There may be no end to such discoveries, if civilization survives. A truly decent and honest person will always seek to discover forms of oppression, hierarchy, domination, and authority that infringe fundamental human rights. As some are overcome, others will be revealed that previously were not part of our conscious awareness. We thus come to a better understanding of who and what we are in our inner nature, and who and what we should be in our actual lives. This

The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters.

Eighty years ago, Martin Heidegger extolled Nazi Germany as providing the best hope for rescuing the glorious civilization of the Greeks from the barbarians of the East and West. Today, German bankers are crushing Greece under an economic regime designed to maintain their wealth and power.

In other words, first we rob and then destroy them, and then when they ask for a little bit of help, we kick them in the face. The technical term for this is Western civilization.

August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but — so the evidence suggests — not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts

Es sabido desde hace mucho tiempo que si se produjera un primer ataque de una gran potencia, incluso si ninguna otra respondiera, probablemente destruiría la civilización por las consecuencias del invierno nuclear que provocaría. Hay información sobre este asunto en el Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, así que es bien conocido. El peligro siempre ha sido mucho más grave de lo que pensábamos

You can have a coke since you never did learn to be civilized and drink coffee.

They inhabit the earth, live among people. Lots of politics and protocol." Dana sat on the floor. "Anything