Quotes About Civilization

If you build a society in which children honor their parents, your society will long survive. And the corollary is: a society in which children do not honor their parents is doomed to self-destruction. In our time, this connection between honoring parents and maintaining civilization is not widely recognized.

respect for your elders was one of the cornerstones of civilized behavior

We passed the rest of the day in pleasant conversation, wandering among his reminiscences of the dear departed days when men were men, and the pernicious weed of civilization was less rampant upon the bonny wild face of the Highlands.

The Frenchman's Gold! Beyond its value as treasure—which would belong to the Crown in any case—the gold had a considerable and personal value to John William Grey. The finding of that half-mythical hoard would be his passport out of Ardsmuir—back to London and civilization.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

Our world desperately needs change. We all know this. The scope of this change ranges from our lifestyles to the direction of our civilization. When we acknowledge our greatness and start living it, when we open our hearts to the natural kindness and a caring for all beings that resides within us all, all the necessary transformations can begin.

If we are aware, if we use the power of choice consciously and conscientiously, we can have an enormous impact on the direction of our societies and our civilization.

DE ALGUNAS LEYES QUE LOS INCAS TUVIERON EN SU GOBIERNO Nunca tuvieron pena pecuniaria ni confiscación de bienes, porque decían que castigar en la hacienda y dejar vivos los delincuentes no era desear quitar los malos de la república, sino la hacienda a los malhechores, y dejarlos con más libertad para que hiciesen mayores males.

The full story of all this, replete with numerous photographs, was first published in 1986 by anthropologist Randolfo Rafael Pozos as The Face on Mars: Evidence for a Lost Civilization.

IN THE EIGHTH DECADE of the twentieth century, a man named Elmer Pendell published a small book entitled WHY CIVILIZATIONS SELF-DESTRUCT (1977).

the difference between a strong and weakened civilization is its ratio of internal continuities and discontinuities – and when the latter increase so as to overwhelm the former, then zippo, the civilization collapses from within itself.

This can be explained in part by understanding and accepting the historical fact that almost all past cultures, however seen as great, otherwise, were fundamentally based on massive broadband slavery, serfdom, and various other under-classes whose principal function was to be in servitude to the upper overlords. Such was certainly the case, for example, in ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Roman, Chinese, and most old Nordic cultures, etc.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

There are several important lessons to be learned from Nanking, and one is that civilization itself is tissue-thin.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has a monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin—one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

The delicate task that faces our civilization today is not to reform the secular, rationalist orthodoxy, which has passed beyond the point of redemption. Rather, it is to breathe new life into the older, now largely comatose, religious orthodoxies—while resisting the counterculture as best we can, adapting to it and reshaping it where we cannot simply resist.

Fontenelle was the most civilized man of his time, and indeed of most times.

We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city.

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.

We are passing through an eerie phase of history in which the things that everyone really knows are treated as unheard-of doctrines, a time in which the elements of common decency are themselves attacked as indecent. Nothing quite like this has ever happened before. Although our civilization has passed through quite a few troughs of immorality, never before has vice held the high moral ground.

To discover the 'traces of God' in nature does not indeed save us, but it does mane us wise, as tradition says; for we discover in the memory of nature a wisdom of existence and life which mirrors the wisdom of God, and for human civilization it is wise to co-operate with nature and to become integrated in it, instead of exploiting and hence destroying it in the interests of human domination.

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.