Quotes About Civilization

Everything goes. But the one thing that separates human beings from animals is a nobility of spirit, a sense of self-worth. I have ideals. I think they're what holds civilization together, and that if you cheapen yourself with careless encounters, you lose sight of things that truly matter.

What's the good of being civilized, that's what I'd like to know? It just means other people can break the rules and you can't.

Not long ago the world looked on the dark ages with contempt for its brutality, yet here it is again, in full force, a lawless sadism unpolished by all the charms of religion and civilization. Sitting

Why was it, she asked herself, that animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?

Why was it, she asked herself, that animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?

It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation had said, All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did.

The city is a device for measuring time.

Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.

We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations." "Gorgeous evasions," he said. "Great escapes.

i once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow s foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization

I've always liked it about the Greeks that they kept the violence off the stage.

We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.

We don't like to admit it, said Julian, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks and the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?

We don't like to admit it," said Julian, "but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people—the ancients no less than us—have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self.

the theory and the practice of Imperialism regarded as a "mission of civilisation," in its effects upon "lower" or alien peoples, and its political and moral reactions upon the conduct and character of the Western nations engaging in it.

Already enough is known to show that the whole concept of the superiority of Western Christian civilization is one based on an arrogant ignorance of the rest of the world.

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of others. The writer and the artist appeal to that humanity. For that reason, literature and art are the bones of civilization.

Tower of the Elephant in my third novel, Savage Son: "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.

Robert E. Howard from The Tower of the Elephant in my third novel, Savage Son: "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.

Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.

This could never be a crime in any society which deems himself enlightened.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

The literary fairy tale became an acceptable social symbolic form through which conventionalized motifs, characters, and plots were selected, composed, arranged, and rearranged to comment on the civilizing process and to keep alive the possibility of miraculous change and a sense of wonderment.