Quotes About Civilization

The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.

Las razones por las que estamos aquí forman una cadena tan inverosímil que la posibilidad de que alguna otra civilización tecnológica exista en la Vía Láctea en la actualidad es remotísima. Estamos solos, y lo mejor es que nos hagamos la idea.

Las posibilidades de la civilización humana están enturbiadas por muchas incertidumbres de nuestra propia creación, incluyendo las guerras, el cambio de clima antropogénico, y la degradación del medio ambiente.

After the rise and decline of Greek civilisation and the Roman destruction of the city of Carthage, they made one area of the conquered territories into a province which they called Africa, a word derived from afri and the name of a group of people about whom little is known. At first the word applied only to the Roman colonies of North Africa. There was a time when all dark-skinned people were called Ethiopians, for the Greeks referred to Africa as the Land of the Burnt-face People.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes—toward an infinity of unsatisfying and disagreeable endings. The wholly anticlimactic, unsatisfying, and disagreeable news that the Rev. Lewis Merrill was my father—not to mention the death of Owen Meany—is just one example of the condition of universal disappointment

Uruk retained a certain importance, but it never recovered its former political power. Its ruins now lie isolated in the deserts of Iraq.

The number of Homo sapiens sapiens that have ever lived, fought, loved, fussed pottered and finally died over the last 100,000 years is around ninety billion.

everyone alive on the planet today is related both to Confucius (551–479 BC) and to Nefertiti (1370–1330 BC). So

So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best.

Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that.

In sum, when we reveal the larger picture that Eurocentrism obscures, then its pristine picture of Western civilisation - as autonomous, ingenious and morally progressive - appears more like Oscar Wilde's picture of Dorian Gray, whose real image has been hidden away from the viewer.

The great menace of civilization in the present is that we offer an education with too little regard for the roots.

The civilised cultures are the most cruel. It's the same with education - often it breeds sadistic forms of cruelty.

To defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilization, you need education...

Humans build their societies around consumption of fossil water long buried in the earth, and these societies, being based on temporary resources, face the problem of being temporary themselves.

COâ'' emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.

Civilization's shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

Mankind is busily manufacturing its way into extinction.

We must, then, apply the principle of Doubt to Civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.

Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a European habit to distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The laws of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars

The Holocaust was born at the meeting point of two traditions that marked modern Western civilization: "the anti-Semitic tradition and the tradition of genocide of colonized peoples.