Quotes About Civilization

It was only as part of the civilizing process that storytelling developed within the aristocratic and bourgeois homes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through governesses and nannies, and later in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through mothers, who told bedtime stories.

Many lessons can be learned from the history of Western civilization, but one of them is especially clear. Lack of involvement in the affairs of one's society can lead to a sense of powerlessness. In an age that is often crisis-laden and chaotic, an understanding of our Western heritage and its lessons can be instrumental in helping us create new models for the future. For we are all creators of history, and the future of Western and indeed world civilization depends on us.

The slum is as old as civilization.

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

Civilisation hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding.

It is a fine line, in all of us, between civilization and savagery. To any who think they would never cross it, I can only say, if you have never known what it is to be utterly betrayed and abandoned, you cannot know how close it is.

A major fact of our present civilization is that more and more sin becomes collective, and the individual is forced to participate in collective sin.

The primary element in any civilization is a stable relation between man and his environment. When man becomes the plaything of abstract decisions, a civilization can no longer be created.

People in their natural condition are incapable on their own of seeing the spiritual reality within which they struggle. They see only what appear to be social, political, or economic problems, and they try to work within this appearance using technical means and moral criteria. In this way they end up in situations that are always more false and complicated, until what they have called their civilization reaches the point of collapse.

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

He judges the present time in virtue of a meta-historical fact, and the incursion of this event into the present is the only force capable of throwing off the dead weight of social and political institutions which are gradually crushing the life out of our present civilization.

Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern.

The old dream that has tempted man from the beginning, the medieval legend of the man who sells his soul for an inexhaustible purse, which recurs with an enticing insistence through all the changes of civilization, is perhaps in process of being realized, and not a for a single man but all.

La prévoyance commence lorsque nous acceptons que nous sommes maintenant arrivés à créés une civilisation du risque.

Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.

En el Valle de México la búsqueda arqueológica ha sido fructífera; prácticamente no se puede abrir una zanja sin encontrar restos del período azteca o de épocas anteriores

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.

Very different thought styles are used for one and the same problem more often than are very closely related ones. It happens more frequently that a physician simultaneously pursues studies of a disease from a clinical-medical or bacteriological viewpoint together with that of the history of civilization, than from a clinical-medical or bacteriological one together with a purely chemical one.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Civilization has been thrust upon me... and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.

As a child I understood how to give, I have forgotten this grace since I have become civilized. -

We were a roiling mass of opinion, most of it mean. Here we sat at civilization's technological peak, and what we chose to do on that shining pinnacle was hate each other's guts.

Because boys, and later men, regardless of their best intentions often seemed to yearn for something they just never succeeded in defining. You pitied them for it, your heart went out to them, but still there was a chronic gap between what they should be and what they were capable of being. Into that gap civilization fell.

It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which competition can be put out of civilized life. Competition is the condition of life.