Quotes About Civilization

History is less the evolution of humanity than the unfolding of facets of human nature.

An age is civilized if it does not reserve intelligence for professional work.

The most precise and shortest definition of a true civilization has been given by Trevelyan: A leisured class with large and learned libraries in their country seats.

Man tends to exercise all his powers. The impossible seems to him the only legitimate limit. A civilized man, however, is one who for various reasons refuses to do everything he can.

With the appearance of "rational" relations among individuals the process of a society's decay begins.

Vulgarity is not a product of the people but a subproduct of bourgeois prosperity.

The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.

Die Jahre der Jugend genügen in einer zivilisierten Gesellschaft, um die Sensibilität, die Intelligenz, die Seele zu erziehen. Heute ist dies durch den Einsatz eines ganzen Lebens kaum zu erreichen

Let us not expect the rebirth of civilization as long as man has not again learnt to feel humiliated when he devotes himself to economic tasks.

Al despojarse de la túnica cristiana y de la toga clásica, no queda del europeo sino un bárbaro pálido

La violencia no basta para destruir una civilización. Cada civilización muere de la indiferencia ante los valores peculiares que la fundan.

A civilization's memory resides in the continuity of its institutions. The revolution that interrupts a civilization's memory, by destroying those institutions, does not relieve society of a bothersome caparison that is paralyzing it, but merely forces it to start over.

When he repudiates rites, man reduces himself to an animal that copulates and eats.

Ce siècle sombre lentement dans un marécage de sperme et de merde. Lorsqu'il traitera des événements actuels, le futur historien devra enfiler des gants.

Civilization is what is born when the soul does not surrender to its congenital vulgarity.

Depopulate and reforest ? first civilizing rule.

Although it grieves the angelism of the democrat: one cannot build a civilisation with miserable biological material.

The veneer of civilization is very thin.

how much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners...

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.

Mankind is close to savagery and must live by rules. If not, we would sink into our own animal nature and perish.

A lawless place and a lawless people, the Italians said. A true frontier of civilization. Dangerous. FIFTY-FIVE The Stanhope Hotel was on Fifth Avenue at Eighty-third Street, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was

Because the plastic brain can always allow brain functions that it has brought together to separate, a regression to barbarism is always possible, and civilization will always be a tenuous affair that must be taught in each generation and is always, at most, one generation deep.

civilization will always be a tenuous affair that must be taught in each generation and is always, at most, one generation deep.