Quotes About Civilization

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized. Within

The first laws and proclamations of ethics—the Code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments of the Hebrews, the Edicts of Emperor Ashoka, can be read as attempts to harness, subdue, and domesticate emotional life.

The slow, deliberate forces of evolution that have shaped our emotions have done their work over the course of a million years; the last 10,000 years, despite having witnessed the rapid rise of human civilization and the explosion of the human population from five million to five billion, have left little imprint on our biological templates for emotional life.

The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.

You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live... I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity... This is what prevents them: They're unable to find the bars of the cage.

You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.

Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.

Yes,I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft,but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.

It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture.

We had been taken from The Wild and brought together in one place, because, for some strange reason, people found us interesting.

You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.

And if being civilized means anything at all, it should mean you're the leaders of the club, not its only criminals and destroyers.

I'm saying that the price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has written: "The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.

Like our imaginary airman, they were totally unaware that there is a law that must be complied with in order to achieve civilizational flight.

Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

Long before the advent of what scientists and scholars consider to be the beginning of human civilization, there was an age undreamed of ... the age of Atlantis.

Our shouting is louder than our actions, Our swords are taller than us, This is our tragedy. In short We wear the cape of civilisation But our souls live in the stone age

The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.

Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill bred it is!

It's an essential fight librarians are making, an age-old fight; yours is a battle for civilization. It's a fight for our country's founding values.

We have progressed from the stone age and moved on to the age of stone hearted people

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a 'practical' point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.