Quotes About Civilization

T]he social canons and methods by which people build up instinct controls in their communal life are not brought into being deliberately; they evolve over long periods, blindly and without plan. Irregularities and contradictions in drive-controls, huge fluctuations in their severity or leniency, are therefore among the recurrent structural features of the civilizing process.

W]e must add at once that a judgement on Mozart's verbal coprophilia would necessarily miss the mark if it applied present-day standards of civilization, thus implicitly regarding our own canon of sensibility as universal, a canon for the whole mankind, and not as one that has developed. To do justice to Mozart's tendency, we need to have a clear idea of the civilizing process in the course of which the social canon of behavior and feeling changes in a specific way.

The only thing that separates us from the animals...is we have pornography.

She'd never trusted her own natural impulses and instincts Among her greatest fears was the possibility that she might never discover and develop her deepest talents and intuitions. Her special gifts. Her life would be wasted in pursuing the goals set for her by other people. Instead, she wanted to reclaim a power and authority - a primitive, irresistible force - that transcended gender roles. She dreamed of wielding a raw magic that predated civilization itself.

Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity. Only the miserable, the failures, the outcasts will crouch for days to observe the mating habits of a salamander.

Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity.

Why do the impulsive notions of a would-be do-gooder always translate into the ideals of the next civilization?

This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right-away destruction of civilization.

Zivilisation ist ein Zustand, den ungesellige Eigenbrötler dem Rest der unbeschwerten, familienorientierten Menschheit auferlegen.

We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we helped them make a civilization, didn't we? And why? I said I didn't know; it was beyond me. Because, he said, we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers.

Enquanto baluarte, a Muralha não fazia sentido. Os hunos, os mongóis e os manchus transpuseram-na quase sem impedimento. (…) Talvez, de uma forma não intencional, ela constituísse menos uma defesa física do que uma monstruosa delimitação. Separava a civilização da barbárie, a luz das trevas.

This is one of the most urgent problems for civilized man. He has created civilization to give himself security. Security for what? For boredom? His chief problem seems to be that most human beings need a certain amount of challenge, of external stimulus, to stop them from sinking into the blank stare and blank consciousness of the idiot.

it is only the species Homo sapiens that is played out. 'The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in on mankind.' In the final pages of the pamphlet, his trump of the last judgement has changed into the question: Can civilization be saved?

The deluded vision of personality that our Western civilization fosters and glorifies, increases the inward division; Lawrence recognized it as the enemy. The war against it is therefore inevitably a revolt against Western civilization.

my father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit, Ridgeway said. All these years late, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. One destiny by divine perscription--the American imperative.

I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription – the American imperative.

My father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit," Ridgeway said. "All these years later, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription—the American imperative.

The white man in the book, Gulliver, roved from peril to peril, each new island a new predicament to solve before he could return home. That was the man's real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered—he kept forgetting what he had. That was white people all over: Build a schoolhouse and let it rot, make a home then keep straying.

prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription—the American imperative.

I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine

The world is chaos, punctuated by brief outbreaks of civilization. Mitch

Abel came to the sad conclusion that he was watching a once-great civilization slide toward the abyss. The masses wanted the state to provide for them in every way, and the politicians who promised the most largesse were the ones who were elected. They in turn gave the people what they wanted, which then placed an ever-increasing burden on the most productive members of society.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the think veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.