Quotes About Civilization

Six beverages in particular—beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola—chart the flow of world history. Three contain alcohol, and three contain caffeine, but what they all have in common is that each one was the defining drink during a pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the present day.

During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began.

When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, every educated person knew that it symbolised admiration for the achievements of the ancient world. Architecture had become a metaphor for civilisation.

We are all just monkeys with money and guns.

We can mark a day on the calendar where America has fallen to a new low. This is now the condoning of taking matters, and the law, into you own hands and going to any lengths - even jungle savagery.

We are already the most overinformed, underreflective people in the history of civilization," argue Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

The West is dying. Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink. Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the fourteenth century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization.

As Rome passed away, so, the West is passing away, from the same causes and in much the same way. What the Danube and Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and Europe, the frontiers of a civilization no longer defended.

Oh for women at sea to obviate the eternal crosscat-harpings,' he said to himself, 'to do away with the grumlinfuttocks, and to inject a little civilization, even of an equivocal nature, even at the risk of moral deviation.

Another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to this liking.

Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. The world is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go.

But climate change isn't just killing people; it may well kill civilization.

In continental Europe,' wrote a distraught John Maynard Keynes, shortly after storming out of the British delegation at Versailles, 'the earth heaves and no one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance or "labour troubles"; but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.'24

People will tell you, "What's the use? What's the point of reading novels and poetry?" They'll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized.

Everywhere you looked in India there was evidence of a past that had attained mythical heights. From philosophy to architecture, few civilisations have left such an awesome record.

Feminists too often believe that no one has never experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of rules and civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware is necessary confusion, division and much lost time.

The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat.

Advice for a human 86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.

In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.

Indifference to the fine arts comes close to barbarism.

Discussions of Western civilization are too often confined to works of high art that reflect a relatively narrow element of public taste and experience.