Quotes About Civilization

We must remain aware that, despite the veneer of civilization and the outward manifestations of culture and refinement, insidious atavistic impulses remain in every country and no nation has a monopoly on atrocity.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

We in America never knew the village commune. White Civilization struck our shores in a broad tide-sheet and swept over the country inclusively; among us was never seen the little commune growing up from a state of barbarism independently, out of primary industries, and maintaining itself within itself. There was no gradual change from the mode of life of the native people to our own; there was a wiping out and a complete transplantation of the latest form of European civilization.

Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science.

a stateless society (a civilization without a government) which Marx and Engels vigorously advocated would be an unorganized mob. It would be no society at all.

From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread.

I command you to leave me at once, for your ideas and phantasies are but the illusions that creep like maggots into civilizations when they begin to decline, and into minds when they begin to decay.

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

Il mare è in effetti quel barbarico stato di indistinzione e disordine da cui è emersa la civiltà e nel quale è sempre possibile che essa ricada, ove non venga salvata dagli sforzi degli dèi e degli uomini. (Gl'irati flutti)

Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.

The burgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations into civilization.

CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.

Our civilization depends critically on software, and we have a dangerously low degree of professionalism in the computer fields

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

Well, we can't afford blindness anymore. There are tens of thousands of thugs who loathe liberty and love death, and want to annihilate Western civilization.

A community where everyone is a ruthless murderer, with handy access to death-dealing devices, is a very polite community.

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

This punishment of death is the remedy, as it were, of a sick society.

Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact

the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead

Mientras permanecía allí sentado con sus colegas resultaba extraño pensar que unas personas tan bien educadas, unos profesionales tan civilizados, hubieran cedido en buen grado al venerable sueño humano de una situación en la que un solo hombre puede encarnar el mal. Sin embargo, existe esa necesidad, y es imperecedera y profunda.

Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.