Quotes About Civilization

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

(On Western civilization) I think it would be a good idea.

Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.

Michael Oldstone, in his book Viruses, Plagues, and History, wrote: "The obliteration of diseases that impinge on our health is a regal yardstick of civilization's success, and those (scientists) who accomplish that task will be among the true navigators of a brave new world."     With

So the city emerges as man's ultimate attempt to become manmade, born from himself rather than from Mother Nature. The feeling of self-sufficiency he achieves through the city is largely abstract and spurious: The sources of our biological lives remain the same as they always were—they come from Matter and Land. But city-man maintains contact with his natural life-sources not through immediate body experience, but through an artificial medium of exchange: money.

In the long run, the fall of one civilization is very much like the fall of another. Only the land remains.

a world remade in the image of Walt Disney, and driven by an increasingly sophisticated communications technology, is the total breakdown of civilization.20

Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civili- zation, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.

For a zoned-out, stupefied populace, "democracy" will be nothing more than the right to shop, or to choose between Wendy's and Burger King, or to stare at CNN and think that this managed infotainment is actually the news. Corporate hegemony, the triumph of global democracy/consumerism based on an American model, is the collapse of American civilization. So a large-scale transformation is indeed going on, but it is one that makes triumph indistinguishable from disintegration.

A modern school of historians contends that the so-called Dark Ages were a period of ascent rather than of decline, that with the withering of the pagan classic civilization came the first budding of a new culture that was to develop into our modern civilization.

Even the greatest Greek algebraist, Diophantus, who lived during the latter part of the Alexandrian Greek civilization (around A.D. 250), rejected irrationals as numbers.

The system of positional notation we use derives from the Hindus; however, the same scheme was used two milleniums earlier by the Babylonians, but to a more limited extent because they did not have a zero.

A human society without myth has never been known, and indeed it is doubtful whether such a society is at all possible. One measure of man's advance from his most primitive beginnings to something we call civilization is the way in which he controls his myths, his ability to distinguish between the areas of behavior, the extent to which he can bring more and more of his activity under the rule of reason.

Compared with the Egyptians, the Greeks are childish mathematicians." - Plato

it becomes clearer that modern culture has derived its basis from Ancient Egypt, though the credit is not often given, nor the integrity of the practices maintained in the new religions. This is another important reason to study Ancient Egyptian Philosophy, to discover the principles which allowed their civilization to prosper over a period of thousands of years in order to bring our systems of government, religion and social structures to a harmony with ourselves, humanity and with nature.

They created a vast civilization and culture earlier than any other society in known history and organized a nation that was based on the concepts of balance and order as well as spiritual enlightenment.

Early Beginnings: The First Religion Shetaut Neter is the Ancient Egyptian Religion and Philosophy. Ancient Egypt was the first and most ancient civilization to create a religious system that was complete with all three stages of religion,

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity.

Exchange is the lifeblood, not only of our economy, but of civilization itself.

lifeblood, not only of our economy, but of civilization

a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of "nationalism" has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles

All began in the name of Civilisation, Christianity, Commerce and then Colonisation.

Before the famous story of Moses and the Israelites, it is said that Abraham the father of Arabs and Jews went to Egypt and found it to be well civilized.