Quotes About Civilization

Nevertheless, despite all superficial continuity, a remarkable change has come about within the last seventy-five years. The change is nothing less than the substitution of paganism for Christianity as the dominant view of life. Seventy-five years ago, Western civilization, despite inconsistencies, was still predominantly Christian; today it is predominantly pagan. (1923)

Each of us in our own way can try to spread compassion into peopleís hearts. Western civilizations these days place great importance on filling the human 'brain' with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human 'heart' with compassion. This is what the real role of religion is.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

Poetry is the flower of civilization," said Chesterton in one lecture. "Romanticism has worked itself out in our time in nonsense and dirt. We should remind the humanists that if poetry has become too personal it has also become unpoetic.

Fear believes—courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and prays—courage stands erect and thinks. Fear is barbarism—courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion, courage is science.

showed him strangenesses in his own nature that partly alarmed him, but partly pleased him too – because they confirmed what he hoped about himself: that he did not belong, not quite, in the deadly properness around him. No, there was a whole aspect of his character that was an unmentioned half-brother to his civilised side: drunk and disorderly and primitive, closer to the woods than the city.

Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilising power of social progress.

The British are civilized. People still read and some conversations can be interesting. By contrast American are fat and stupid and so thoroughly brain-blurred and over-sold by our culture that there's a numbing, unapologetic, arrogance and desperation about us. In fact, I've just defined the perfect consumer.

Roman Technology

Author Bill Bryson has this to say about our national obsession with shopping-- 'We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

The car rolled slowly along the deserted corniche, headlights cleaving its way through Beirut by night. In gentle swerves to avoid potholes, the Mercedes waltzed along a straight road in a dance of death. Sick palm trees and parched grass divided the tarred road of civilization. The sea alone was testimony to God's beautiful creation. But in its belly, corpses, limbs, garbage, and ordnance mingled with a sea life on the verge of extinction.

But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle to Aquinas, to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized life.

What a true history of the Cuban missile crisis reveals is that the existence of masses of nuclear weapons in the hands of leaders of the superpowers, the United States and Russia—even when those leaders are about as responsible, humane, and cautious as any we have seen—posed then, and still do, intolerable dangers to the survival of civilization.

City burning, in other words, was becoming something of a science.

The human beings who appear in the data, survivors or not, are grouped under one machine designated classification: Hero. These damn machines knew us and loved us, even while they were tearing our civilization to shreds.

IT IS A WELL-ESTABLISHED Achilles' heel of human civilization that individuals are more motivated by immediate private reward than by long-term, collective future benefits.

IT IS A WELL-ESTABLISHED Achilles' heel of human civilization that individuals are more motivated by immediate private reward than by long-term, collective future benefits. This effect is particularly evident when considering payoffs that will take longer than a generation to arrive—a phenomenon called intergenerational discounting

It has been subsequently theorized that our species' seeming inability to focus on long-term existential threats will inexorably lead to the destruction of our environment, overpopulation, and resource exhaustion. It is therefore not an uncommon belief among economists that this inborn deficit represents a sort of built-in timer for the self-destruction of human civilization.

I will murder you by the billions to give you immortality. I will set fire to your civilization to light your way forward. But know this: My species is not defined by your dying, but by your living.

The Greeks saw the advance of civilization bringing new ills. Their sour parable of technological progress was the familiar myth of Prometheus. Punished for affronting the gods by stealing fire for men's use, Prometheus was chained to a rock so an eagle could feed on his liver, which grew back each night. According to Lucretius, necessity had led men to invent, and then inventions spawned frivolous needs that equipped and encouraged them to slaughter one another in war.

India is a land of plenty inhibited by poverty; India has an enthralling, uplifting civilization that sparkles not only in our magnificent art, but also in the enormous creativity and humanity of our daily life in city and village.

Every civilization is founded on sins - every single one. Dispossession, violence, appropriation. What distinguishes civilizations are the ones who rise above it.

The rise of man from the animal to the human level was prolonged by the necessity of rising from a state of barbarism and violence to one of order and peace.

It is a relatively small number of people who want to impose their will by the use of terror on the rest of civilization, who have got a program. It's not blind violence. It's with a purpose. They want to destroy the state of Israel. They want every westerner out of the Arab countries, Middle East and elsewhere.