Quotes About Civilization

History can still be seen in every culture, economics, politics, ideologies and in our philosophies.

There is nothing civilized about abortion. Rather, it is the main path for the decivilization of humanity.

there is a sense in which literacy actually distorts the archeological record, for while it illuminates the centers of civilization, it makes the darkness surrounding even darker.

What is needed is history, genuine history, multi-faceted history, 'thick description' history that takes seriously the full range of human life and culture.

The point about Philippi being a colony of Rome was not that the citizens would go back to Rome one day, but that (so it was hoped) they would bring the benefits of Roman civilization to Philippi.

The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

Paperwork is a creation of the modern world. Do you think they had paperwork four hundred years ago - no, all they had was love & witnesses.

It was an article of faith in eighteenth-century British thought that civilized societies usually formed out of the fundamental human need for security to ensure survival, but the same societies were gradually corrupted by a preoccupation with luxuries, which resulted in decadence.

Wars in general, and civil wars to a greater degree, have the effect of exacerbating class tensions, because the sacrifices of war are always distributed unequally, and the poor are hit hardest. North and South had staked so much on their class-based definitions of nationhood that it is no exaggeration to say that in the grand scheme of things, Union and Confederate leaders saw the war as a clash of class systems wherein the superior civilization would reign triumphant.

The consequences of an ungrateful spirit are not as readily seen as, say, those of a contagious disease. But they are no less deadly. Western civilization has fallen prey to an epidemic of ingratitude. Like a poisonous vapor, this subtle sin is polluting our lives, our homes, our churches, and our culture.

In the past, most civilizations held that reality consists of both a natural order and a moral order, integrated into an overall unity. Therefore, our knowledge of reality was likewise thought to be a single, unified system of truth.

Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn't an "issue" to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.

For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels, and the bill has come due. Yet, we have sat around the dinner table denying that it is our bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it.

Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free market capitalism.

The great mass of society are far from being depraved; for if a large majority were criminal or inclined to break the laws, where would the force or power be to prevent or constrain them? And herein is the real blessing of civilization, because this happy result has its origin in her bosom, growing out of her very nature.

To win the big stakes in this changed world, you must catch the spirit of the great pioneers of the past, whose dreams have given to civilization all that it has of value, the spirit that serves as the life-blood of our own country – your opportunity and mine, to develop and market our talents.

Well, right now, I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean, probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it.

It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn't do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had only seen its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world.

Custer wrote, "I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.

Any complex technology is the product of many antecedents. Destroy the infrastructure of a society supporting such technology and, though the knowledge itself might not be lost, the society would lose the basis on which the tech was built. Members of a human civilization bombed back into the Stone Age are hardly going to be able to build computers from flint and wood.

Morality, he often argued, is a purely human invention only to be indulged in times of plenty.

Ancient Greeks did not think in terms of race (later translators would put that word in their mouths); instead, Greeks thought of place.

The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man,