Quotes About Civilization

No civilized being lived in North Dakota.

The effect of civilization is to impose human law upon environment until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about gruesome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove to the family vault, where the hinges are kept from rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away.

Life creeps slowly upward.... When some forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that most tremendous of artifices, CIVILIZATION!

When savage nations are first visited by the civilized, they evince the greatest eagerness to obtain iron, as soon as they have come to know the uses of it, while the Christians who go amongst them, manifest a still greater desire for the possession of gold. To accomplish these mutual ends, the savages resort to cunning, pilfering, and bartering, and their more enlightened brethren to deception, violence, and fraud.

Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.

The Denarians want to disrupt civilization, and with the Archive under their control, they could do it. Maybe they'd use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they'd crash the world economy. Maybe they'd turn every program on television into one of those reality shows." "That's mostly done already, Harry.

They say civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism. Chicago stood waiting for the first tearing sound.

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense. from The Beast God Forgot to Invent

In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect. The effect is lively and avaricious and intensely self-absorbed, a tone not uncommon in colonial cities, and the principal reason I find such cities invigorating.

Non ci sono demoni ma una serie di archetipi comuni a ogni civiltà.

The earth is not supposed to be developed and civilized by prayers alone, the earth is supposed to be civilized by hard work, labour and diligence.

A people so primitive that they did not know how to get money except by working for it.

No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids - human beings built them, because they're clever and they work hard.

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction

Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.

Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.

Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight

Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it's been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians. Nothing

All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications.

Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it's been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians.

La nostra nevrosi, amico mio, è un prodotto del nostro modo di vivere un po' troppo artistico; ma è anche una fatale eredità, che la civiltà rende di generazione in generazione sempre più onerosa. Se vogliamo diagnosticare lo stato del nostro temperamento dobbiamo annoverarci fra quelli che soffrono di una nevrosi la cui origine è già molto lontana.

And the diseases from which we civilized people suffer most are melancholy and pessimism. So I, for instance, who can count so many years of my life during which I lost any inclination to laugh - leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault - I, for one, feel the need for a really good laugh above all else. I've found it in Guy de Maupassant, and there are others - Rabelais among the older writers

The present time is so interesting if one considers that it is possible we shall witness the beginning of the end of a society.

Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.