Quotes About Civilization

the police, that shield of civilization...

The Baghdad Zoo experience certainly altered my perception of my own species and inexorably pushed me to explore in more depth mankind's near-suicidal relationship with the plant and animal kingdoms. The most crucial lesson I learned in Baghdad was this: If "civilized" man is capable of routinely justifying such blatant abuse of trapped wildlife, what of the other unseen atrocities being inflicted on our planet?

Now I know what development means: air-conditioning. With air-conditioning, we can have civilization, which exists only in temperate climates.

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library ... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

In intellectual and popular culture, war has come to be regarded by many as a peculiar psychosis of Western civilization. This atmosphere of Western self-reproach and neo-Rousseauian nostalgia is prevalent in the views espoused by many postwar anthropologists.

The laws of physics suggest we cannot go in one direction forever. Sooner or later, something will slow us down. Whether it be stocks, housing prices, economies, or entire civilizations, even the biggest boom stall. We build castles, churches, and monuments believing they will last forever; our perception of solidity often belies an underlying movement that is difficult to perceive. Sometimes we can see the wave of change coming. But more often we are swept along in it.

Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.

When the cathedrals were white, spirit was triumphant. But today the cathedrals of France are black and the spirit is bruised. The works of the new civilization are coming together in a symphonic crescendo. The guiding spirit is faltering. The young act, but they do not know. The old cling to their accumulated treasures, but are unable to accomplish anything further.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.

My book had a universal theme. It's not a "racial" novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.

Life is the tamer of the wild beast of humanity.

They built cities, terraced hillsides and irrigated fields, shaped the land with intentional fires, and cleared forests, all of which contributed directly to deforestation, soil depletion and erosion. In forgetting all these works, the myth of the Ecological Indian infantilises and denies agency to native peoples, erases civilisations and replaces them with imaginary wildernesses. It too is an act of conquest.

The state is the nursing mother of human culture.

History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment.

According to the Mayans, the world is supposed to end in the year 2012. Are you buying that? When's the last time you even ran into a Mayan?

The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.

But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

Civilization is knowledge, even more than it is urbanization, for you cannot have the latter without the former. Everything builds on everything else. And the knowledge of civilization is kept in repositories known as...LIBRARIES, and if books burn, civilization burns with them.

Ironically, societies characterized by a complex division of labor are often marked by inequality and support large specialized armies. Precisely these "civilized" societies are likely to resort to savage violence in their attempts to conquer "primitive" societies.22

The shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture led to one very important development -- it laid the building blocks for civilization as we know it.

What I love is how seamless everything is. You walk throw a forest and come out in a village; and there's no difference, no division. You aren't in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.

That little boys and girls should be tormented is what no one at all acquainted with human nature in a civilized state can deny.