Quotes About Civilization

It is not we Greeks alone who are the inheritors of Greek civilisation... all, of whatever nationality, who share the ancient Greek attitude to life, are Greeks.

It's fitting, then, that we begin this exploration of ourselves and of the world with music, and more specifically with a musical quality called vibrato. This pulsation that wells up within the sounded note can lead us to what is most spontaneous and creative in human life, and possibly even to deeper mysteries--to powers of knowing and doing which we have lost or given away during the epoch of civilization, and which perhaps we may now regain.

History is the short trudge from Adam to atom.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

I believe profoundly in two rules. Justice and mercy – they seem to me the foundation of all civilized life and society, if you include under mercy, toleration.

I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal.

Cannibalism and slavery are probably the oldest manifestations of human predation and submission. Although both are now discouraged, their continued existence in psychological forms demonstrates that civilization has achieved great success in moving from the concrete and physical to the abstract and psychological, while persisting in the same purposes.

With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is "in principle" an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.

Modern history might be told by a succession of dinners.

The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".

But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.

By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.

it seems to me plain that all the elements for the urban implosion were present and that the city, in one form or another, performed its special function-that of complex receptacle for maximizing the possibilities of human intercourse and passing on the contents of civilization.

Both sacred power and temporal power became swollen by absorbing the new inventions of civilization; and the very need for an intelligent control of every part of the environment gave additional authority to those dedicated either to intelligence or control, the priest or monarch, often united in a single office.

If civilized society has not yet outgrown war, as it outgrew less respectable manifestations of primitive magic, like child sacrifice and cannibalism, it is partly because the city itself in its structure and institutions continued to give war both a durable concrete form and a magical pretext for existence. Beneath all war's technical improvements lay an irrational belief, still deeply imbedded in the collective unconscious: only by wholesale human sacrifice can the community be saved.

Perhaps the best definition for the inhabitants of an early city is that they are a permanently captive farm population.

Patently, a chronic state of war was a heavy price to pay for the boasted benefits of 'civilization.' Permanent improvement could come only by exorcising the myth of divine kingship, demounting its too-powerful megamachine and abating its ruthless exploitation of man-power.

Tolstoi felt that the strange dark room he had awakened in, far from home, was a coffin. As in the womb-dream of childhood, he felt himself floating in an oppressive nothingness. No better image could be found for the state of modern man. That collective coffin is now the envelope of our whole 'civilization': not only materialized but accurately symbolized in underground shelters and military control centers: the technocratic tomb of tombs.

The Europeanizing and Asianizing of ancient Egypt are instances of the exceptionalist rule, whereby an ancient African nation (or group of nations) is literally taken out of Africa because of an analytical reduction of civilization into things European and Asian.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.