Quotes About Civilization

The mark of a well-constituted state is that it makes it possible "to avoid the follies of appetite and to keep men within the bounds of reason, as far as possible, that they may live in peace and harmony.

Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.

Mr. Kilt, editor of the Ottawa Citizen, in October of last year. Listen to this. 'What hope is there for a society with such extremes of wealth and poverty as our civilization shows? At the bottom rotting, corroding want and squalor; at the top, enervating luxury, reckless extravagance, useless purposeless lives.

The Queen Mary was the most civilized and luxurious way one could travel to America in the late 1930s.

Freudians argue that the psychological structure is the cause of civilization. Malinowski replaces a psychological causality with a sociological causality and takes the Oedipus complex as a product of civilization. But it is evident that the one thesis and the other are both inseparable and contradictory. We must construct a psychoanalysis and a sociology...which overtakes and synthesizes classical givens.

Man is an historical idea, not a natural species.

This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don't have a common heritage, we don't have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have...is what we want to be.

The Götterdämmerung of the bourgeois world is approaching.

The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape.

Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles...respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law...or, in a word justice.

Because death is meaningless, civilised life as such is meaningless.

Without law men are beasts.

The cult of beauty without social responsibility is a threat to civilization as we know it.

There was a sense of permanence about Egypt; the past was never far from the present.

Another of the great civilizations, the Aztecs, raised a breed of hairless chihuahuas especially for eating. When the Conquistadors arrived and found dog on the menu, they were of the same opinion as Mademoiselle, that this was evidence of the worst form of barbarism. They, the Spaniards, used dogs as befits civilized and Christian men - to hunt down fugitive Indians and tear them to pieces.

In our artificial civilization many young people at twenty-five are still on the threshold of activity. As one looks back then, over eight or nine years, one sees a panorama of seemingly formidable length. So many crises, so many startling surprises, so many vivid joys and harrowing humiliations and disappointments, that one feels startlingly old; one wonders if one will ever feel so old again. —Youth and Life, Randolph S. Bourne (1886–1918) Even now, when I have come

Sword and fist are the instruments of primitive; non-violence is the instrument of developed man!

The more you stand aloof from the sword, from the arrow, from the lance and from the fist, the more you become civilised!

Wars are the strongest evidence for the claim that man is still a wild animal.

You have to protect your food, otherwise someone else takes it! There is no divinity in here! But there is divinity there: In a civilised order where no being has to defend for its food!

Culture makes all men gentle.

Truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism.

Cold love's the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.

I'd been deeply affected by my contact with the miners, not only because of their kindness, but because they'd taken this potentially hellish place and made it, if not heaven, at least human; through their simple rituals of eating, drinking tea, smoking tobacco, praying, playing, and talking, they'd created civilization in one of the most impossible places to imagine it. And what seemed like a miracle to me was, to them, just another day at work!