Quotes About Civilization

Culture civilizes us, and that's why every single despotic regime has tried to smash [the arts].

Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?

The first sign on a declining civilization is a decline in the arts.

In respect to religion and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of barbarism. In the most civilized countries the priest is still but a Powwow, and the physician a Great Medicine.

No arts, no letters - no society.

I think fundamentalism is this radical attitude toward one's own identity and civilization as compared to other people's identities and cultures.

Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.

Though the extractive institutions that the Mayas created produced sufficient wealth for the cities to flourish and the elite to become wealthy and generate great art and monumental buildings, the system was not stable. The extractive institutions upon which this narrow elite ruled created extensive inequality, and thus the potential for infighting between those who could benefit from the wealth extracted from the people. This conflict ultimately led to the undoing of the Maya civilization. W

teorías clásicas de la sociología política, la teoría de la modernización, formulada por Seymour Martin Lipset, que defiende que todas las sociedades, cuando crecen, se dirigen a una existencia más moderna, desarrollada y civilizada y, en particular, hacia la democracia.

Kling identifies three primary languages: Liberals see the world as a battle between victims and oppressors. Conservatives see the world as a battle between civilization and barbarism. Libertarians see the world as a battle between liberty and coercion.

The only way we can eradicate human behavior is to eradicate humans, and that strikes me as pretty extreme.

So if you're a progressive liberal, you see America and the West in general as an oppressive, tyrannical regime bent on capitalist destruction and oppression. Conservatives, who generally view the world through more of a religious lens, want to maintain the hard-fought freedoms we have (civilization) while protecting them from the whims of the day (barbarism). Meanwhile, libertarians see big government and the political machine as the biggest threat to personal freedom.

That's what civilization sometimes did to threats, real or perceived. They walled them off. Us against them. Survival of the fittest. You die so I can live.

While perhaps some would see it as a small issue, the fact was, if debts remained unpaid, whatever followed would genuinely be the collapse of civilization as any of them would know it...And he and millions of others had just fought a world war to ensure that neither anarchy nor fascism nor anything else would replace the reasonable screwing over of people without money by those who possessed damn near all of it.

when civilization gets shown the door, and the rule of law don't matter for shit, and the whole damn world gets set on fire. It's always closer than you think.

It doesn't take much for civilized people to become animals.

Those who claim to believe in liberal principals but advocate more and more confiscation of the wealth created by productive people, more and more exceptions to property rights and the rule of law, more and more transfer of power from society to state, are unwittingly engaged in the ultimately deadly undermining of civilization.

And yet we've flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations. One moment there are these barefoot Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass. Turn around, and their children's children talk about tapping energy from pulsars.

Trying to look at the whole of the past is, it seems to me, like using a map of the world. No geographer would try to teach exclusively from street maps. Yet most historians teach about the past of particular nations, or even of agrarian civilizations, without ever asking what the whole of the past looks like.

Big History is the story of how you and I came to be.

All over the galaxy, men with the best gifts of Science and no skills but those of murder looked for patrons who would hire them to bring down civilization. Business was good.

We can try to act civilized and polite, but at the bottom of it all, the power of any ruler is based on a threat. Fortunately, we don't have to carry that threat out too often.

The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women.

the woven basket between them piled high with greens. The boy and girl looked like some Rousseau ideal, a fantasy of the way the world was supposed to be if civilization went away.