Quotes About Civilization

For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The country which emerged from the Mongol period was far more inward-looking than it had been at the start of the thirteenth century, when Kievan Rus', the loose confederation of principalities which constituted the first Russian state, had been intimately linked with Byzantium.

Isn't that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?

And you don't understand how devastating fear and rage can be, and how quickly religion and civilization and human decency are forgotten when a mob forms.

Civilization is only a pretense; in the crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and becoming instead the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy, wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone that we'll use the moment it comes close enough.

Human is human," said Issib. "But civilized—that's the gift of the Oversoul. Civilization without self-destruction.

when everybody believes that everybody's actions are the result of free choice, and takes and gives responsibility accordingly, the result is civilization.

You don't understand how important faith is to the people of Lusitania,' said Peregrine 'And you don't understand how devastating fear and rage can be, and how quickly religion and civilization and human decency are forgotten when a mob forms.

Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts—those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male.

Civilization is only a pretense; in the crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and become instead the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy, wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone that we'll use the moment it comes close enough.

Father had warned Rigg how the rules changed when you traveled far, and he always warned that the bigger the city, the lower the level of civilization, which had seemed to make no sense to Rigg until now.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.

The essential question that he wanted to ask Freud was if he thought it might be possible to guide the psychological development of humankind so that it became resistant to the psychoses of hate and destruction, thereby delivering civilisation from the hovering menace of war.

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

Incluso ahora, anclado en estas aguas civilizadas, no olvido que la corriente que fluye tranquila lleva a los últimos confines de la tierra... al corazón de las tinieblas.

What seems inconsequential to us by reason of usage is in fact the founding notion of civilization. Language, art, mathematics, everything. Ultimately the world itself and all in it.

It was hard to tell whether things were deteriorating or whether it was just the usual baseline of craziness, made more vivid by the fact that they'd all hunkered down in a fortress to await the collapse of civilization.

The data flow so fast that that the total accumulation of the past two years—a zettabyte [one sextillion bytes]—dwarfs the prior record of human civilization.

You think civilization is some horrible, polluting human invention that separates us from the state of nature. But civilization doesn't separate us from nature. Civilization protects us from nature.

Napoli è la più misteriosa città d'Europa, è la sola città del mondo antico che non sia perita come Ilio, come Ninive, come Babilonia. È la sola città del mondo che non è affondata nell'immane naufragio della civiltà antica. Napoli è una Pompei che non è stata mai sepolta. Non è una città: è un mondo.

Se sentía débil e infinitamente abandonada. Deseaba que algo viniera de fuera en su ayuda. Ayuda que de modo ninguno se presentaba. La sociedad era horrible porque estaba loca. La sociedad civilizada es un despropósito. El dinero y el llamado amor son sus dos grandes manías; con el dinero muy a la cabeza. En su inconexa locura el individuo se identifica a sí mismo con esas dos formas: dinero y amor.

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.

No creo en el mundo, ni en el dinero, ni en el progreso, ni en el futuro de nuestra civilización. Si es que la humanidad tiene un futuro, tendrá que hacerse muy diferente de como es ahora.

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.