Quotes About Civilization

Similarly, throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.

For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families. My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.

farmers are sedentary and live amid their own sewage, thus

example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span

We thereby know that states arose around 3700 B.C. in Mesopotamia and around 300 B.C. in Mesoamerica, over 2,000 years ago in the Andes, China, and Southeast Asia, and over 1,000 years ago in West Africa.

Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?

these differences between the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication, not from limitations of the peoples themselves.

Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequalities of A.D. 1500.

Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.

La historia siguió trayectorias distintas para diferentes pueblos debido a las diferencias existentes en los entornos de los pueblos, no debido a diferencias biológicas entre los propios pueblos».

Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.

technology was less advanced in western Europe than in any other "civilized" area of the Old World until the late Middle Ages.

Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced technology, more complex political organization, and more epidemic diseases with which to infect other peoples.

One suggested function of the first gardens of nearly 11,000 years ago was to provide a reliable reserve larder as insurance in case wild food supplies failed.

El fanatismo en la guerra, del tipo que impulsó las conquistas cristianas e islámicas que conocemos por la historia, fue probablemente desconocido en la Tierra hasta el surgimiento de las jefaturas y, sobre todo, de los estados en los últimos 6.000 años.

As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above "barbarians" or "savages.

My own impression, from having divided my life between United States cities and New Guinea villages, is that the so-called blessings of civilization are mixed. For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families.

For instance, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate but most Iraqis are not: why did writing nevertheless arise nearly four thousand years earlier in Iraq?

Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC.

Geography shapes history; men only add a little colour to its surface.

That's a start," she said. "I'd also like you to review the rules regarding spine bending and turning over the corners of pages. If we let simple things like that slide without punishment, we could open the floodgates to poor reading etiquette and a downward spiral to the collapse of civilization.

A mí me parece que un país civilizado es aquel en que uno no tiene la necesidad de perder el tiempo con la política

José Antonio Primo de Rivera repetía como si fuera suya: «A última hora siempre ha sido un pelotón de soldados el que ha salvado la civilización».

Fine buildings, fine pictures and books and everything that is beautiful are certainly signs of civilization. But an even better sign is a fine man who is unselfish and works with others for the good of all. To work together is better than to work singly, and to work together for the common good is best of all.