Quotes About Civilization

Without a tapestry of caring, civilization would collapse into a chaotic every-man-for-himself battlefield.

O de Ralph Waldo Emerson: «The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization». «El fin de la raza humana será que —eventualmente— morirá de civilización.»

Sleeping in the park in a city is a form of civilization. First, you need a city with enough bustle and clatter to make a person yearn for a calm, green spot. Then you need a first-class park,

Modern India is a product of Hindu tradition, the religion of Islam, and Western civilization.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.

To-day the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation.

Certainly it is possible that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilisation, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society.

All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason.

When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall. It is at such a juncture that their chief mission is plainly visible, and that for a while the philosophy of number seems the only philosophy of history.

To pass in pursuit of an ideal from the barbarous to the civilised state, and then, when this ideal has lost its virtue, to decline and die, such is the cycle of the life of a people.

Sans les traditions, pas de civilisation; sans la destruction de ces traditions, pas de progrès.....Ce n'est pas dans les temples qu'habitent les idoles les plus redoutables, ni dans les palais les tyrans les plus despotiques; ceux_ci peuvent être brisés en un instant; mais les maîtres invisibles qui règnent dans nos âmes échappent à tout effort de révolte, et ne cèdent qu'à la lente usure des siècles

Dejemos pues la razón a los filósofos, pero no exijamos que intervenga demasiado en el gobierno de los hombres. No con la razón, sino a pesar de ella, se han creado sentimientos tales como el honor, la abnegación, la fe religiosa, el amor a la gloria y a la patria, que han sido hasta ahora los grandes resortes de todas las civilizaciones.

Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising.

In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.

by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct.

Pour que vous parveniez à bien nous comprendre, il vous faudrait vivre longtemps , entourées de Noirs, en Afrique, et loin des Blancs dont la civilisation trop poussée finit par tout détruire !

The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.

Linguistic "technology" in the form of sophisticate grammatical structures is not a prerogative of advanced civilization, but is found even in the languages of the most primitive hunter-gatherers. As the linguist Edward Sapir memorably put it in 1921, when it comes to the complexity of grammatical structures "Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam".

They will only bring it down!" The secretary's voice was uncomprehending. Crispin did turn then, to look back over his shoulder. They were staring at him, the three of them, so were the others in the Sanctuary. He said, "I understand. But they will have to DO that. Bring it down. I will make what I make, in this civilized, holy place. Others will have to give the orders to destroy. As barbarians once destroyed Rhodias...since it could not defend itself.

Civilization and culture in North America are more menaced, more strongly threatened, by internal disorders than by external pressure.

Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand civilization, and wouldn't like it if they did. The hitchhikers. The people who create nothing, and who don't appreciate what others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that just exists and that all they need to do is enjoy what they can understand of it--luxuries, a high living standard, and easy work for high pay. Responsibilities? Phooey! What do they have a government for?

is devoted to civilization or anything else outside himself, and that's the mark of the barbarian.

I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in.