Quotes About Civilization

It seems delightfully incongruous,' he wrote from Armentie'res, 'that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour's walk from the trenches

I do not believe that a League of Nations, or a Kellog Pact, or any Disarmamnt Conference, will ever rescue our poor remnant of civilisation from the threatening forces of destruction, until we can somehow impart to the rational processes of constructive thought and experiment that element of sanctified loveliness which, like superb sunshine breaking through thunder-clouds, from time to time glorifies war.

Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a human civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from every wall, rebuilding what had been merely superhuman.

Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time.

Yes," said Ravna, "on Nyjora." In the Age of Princesses, there had been the Elder Princess and the Younger, the Techie. The Age of Princesses was the most recent rediscovery of civilization in any known human history—and that civilization was also the ancestor of Ravna's Sjandra Kei and therefore of Johanna's Straumli Realm.

I'm a librarian, not a leader." "You're both! Librarians and archeologists have always been the ones to bring civilization back.

When someone else in the village tried to extort money from Williams over damaged banana trees, he felt it was a sure sign they were reentering civilization

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

Did the primitive Ancestor have any inkling of voluntary death? Or is that an attainment of the higher civilizations, which offer no other means of escape? Let's

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.

I think our civilization is minimal enough without underlining it. Sculpture as a created object in space should enrich, not reflect, and should be beautiful. Beauty is its function.

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.

Business as usual doesn't work, that we're in a time where we have to rethink a lot of the basic ground rules and assumptions of our civilizations.

Health is the fastest growing failing business in western civilization.

The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.

EROEI [energy returned on energy invested, or net energy] is to a civilization what gross profit is to a business, the source of the surplus that supports the entire enterprise.

In thousands of years there has been no advance in public morals, in philosophy, in religion or in politics, but the advance in business has been the greatest miracle the world has ever known.

Civilisation has, indeed, become a slaughtering-car crowned by a grinning effigy of Comfort, before which man blindly and voluntarily hurls himself in his own ignorance.

It could be so beautiful here if the Americans themselves had not made it so ugly with their big buildings, their millions of cars, and noise.

The land was left vacant, and fewer men were available to defend it. So the Angles, and the Saxons, moved westward. Anglo-Saxon civilization was created by a pandemic.

Many of the roads loosely known as 'Roman roads' are much more ancient; the Romans simply made use of the prehistoric paths. Modern roads have been built along the routes of these ancient lines, so that we still move in the footsteps of our ancestors.