Quotes About Civilization

In civilized society, women have the ultimate power. It's women who say "no," in civilized society. That's what you feminists never have understood.

The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women.

He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.

The Russian norm is an extremely barbaric state of mind.

None but a people advanced to a high state of moral and intellectual excellence are capable in a civilized condition of forming and maintaining free governments, and among those who are so far advanced, very few indeed have had the good fortune to form constitutions capable of endurance.

We need a government, not politics. Because there's too much politics. Of course there should be debate. But there seems to be so much pettiness and not enough good faith. It is civilized to agree to disagree, and this idea is slowly disintegrating. The great statesmen of the past knew this, and I think it helps drive civilization.

Every high school and college graduate in America should, I think, have some familiarity with statistics, economics and a foreign language such as Spanish. Religion may not be as indispensable, but the humanities should be a part of our repertory. They may not enrich our wallets, but they do enrich our lives. They civilize us. They provide context.

People say 'what do you mean' when you talk about 'bringing down civilization.' What I really mean is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and depriving the powerful of the ability to destroy the planet. That's what I really mean.

One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization' (1995), a study of the steel city of Magnitogorsk, the U.S.S.R.'s answer to Pittsburgh, as it was constructed in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in the early nineteen-thirties.

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.

The first and fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself. (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902)

The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.

Once again, as humanity has managed to do with everything from fire to nuclear energy, we have found a great tool that can advance human civilization. And once again, we are at risk of using it to destroy ourselves. Connectedness, only so recently a marvel and a blessing, is now a curse.

And what a city! The perfect geometric layout, the wide avenues and clean sidewalks, all the monuments bathes in celestial light. The contemps around me hav eno idea how long it will take to rebuild something like this. Do they see the beauty around them? Are they dizzy from the heights on this pinnacle their civilization is teetering upon? No--they troop along, necks crooked into their ancient phones like bent marionettes. Their right cheeks glow.

Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured

If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy ... to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous ... let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb." [ Letter Addressed To The Addressers On The Late Proclamation , 1792 (Paine's response to the charge of "seditious libel" brought against him after the publication of The Rights of Man )]

Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured.

Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched,than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

Civil government alone, or the government of laws, is not productive of pretences for many taxes; it operates at home, directly under the eye of the country, and precludes the possibility of much imposition. But when the scene is laid in the uncivilized contention of governments, the field of pretences is enlarged, and the country, being no longer a judge, is open to every imposition, which governments please to act.

Taking it then for granted that no person ought to be in a worse condition when born under what is called a state of civilization, than he would have been had he been born in a state of nature, and that civilization ought to have made, and ought still to make, provision for that purpose, it can only be done by subtracting from property a portion equal in value to the natural inheritance it has absorbed. -Agrarian Justice