Quotes About Civilization

Man is raw and wild, that is one of the reasons why he needs the Christian teaching.

When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.

Man is born a barbarian, and only raises himself above the beast by culture.

And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.

Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science.

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species

When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.

Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free, that civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against abuse of freedom.

Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself.

Man, one may say, was never in such a completely animal condition; but he has, on the other hand, never escaped from it.

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.

We talk of wild animals, but the wildest animal is man.

The debris of civilization litters the landscapes and spoils the beaches. Conservation's concerns now is not only for man's enjoyment-but for man's survival.

Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty.

Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded.

The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

Civilization has gotten further and further from the so-called 'natural' man, who uses all his faculties: perception, invention, improvisation.

If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.

If there is one country and its people that have contributed most to western civilisation's man-made world continuously for the last 2000 years, it must surely be Italy.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

Even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.