Quotes About Civilization

The dogmatic radicals who assail "on principle" the inherited social notions and distinctions are not serving civilization. Society

Capital, however, as we have seen, is the force by which civilization is maintained and carried on. The

Our civilization will, of course, be "playing God" in an ultimate sense of the phrase: evolving a greater intelligence than currently exists on earth. It behooves us to be a considerate creator, wise to the world and its fragile nature, sensitive to the needs for stable footings that will prevent backsliding -- and keep that house of cards we call civilization from collapsing.

Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.

I'm amused when financial planners and academics talk about methods that predict a 40-year success rate of, say, 95%. If you think about it, this implies that our political and financial institutions will remain intact for about the next millenium (40 years divided by a failure rate of 5% equals 800 years). Considering the history of human civilization, this is a pretty heroic assumption.

its city walls encompassed an area of over two square miles, with much of the city apparently lying outside those walls. This made Uruk the largest city not only of its age but for the next three thousand years.

The Story of the Telegraph and a History of the Great Atlantic Cable, in which they breathlessly proclaimed, How potent a power, then, is the telegraphic destined to become in the civilization of the world! This binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.46

The scribe was no mere linguistic technician, but rather the sole possessor of the skill set that made civilization hum, a sort of investment banker, engineer, and diplomat all rolled up into one. Or, in the words of the linguist Ignaz Gelb, "Writing exists only in a civilization, and a civilization cannot exist without writing."47

Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.

To understand the development of Islam and Islamic civilization, we must recognize that the Middle East region into which Islam expanded was a rich repository of centuries of accumulated intellectual exchanges, religious experiences, and administrative practices.

Every marvel of our age arose out of the critical give and take of an open society. No other civilization ever managed to incorporate this crucial innovation, weaving it into daily life. And if you disagree with this ... say so!

This is a lovely world, he sighed. And yet it has suffered horror. Sometimes, so-called civilization seems bent on destroying those very things which it is sworn to protect.

For anyone wishing to argue that once things were worse than they are now, the Middle Ages are ideal. It is widely supposed that having gotten out of them was one of the accomplishments of modern civilization. No contemporary scholar, one might think, would make such a mistake in judgment. A one-man multitude, Pinker champions the case to the contrary. "The people of the middle ages were, in a word, gross."31

The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.

The challenge for us is to realise our unity with all life, and even with the inanimate world around us. The seas with their currents, the atmosphere and the continents of the earth are all in motion, stirring with their own kinds of life. Our malaise as a civilised people comes in large measure from our ability to distance ourselves from nature and from one another. A real therapy is one with a vision, not only of the individual person, but also of how the whole planet is to be healed.

Nebraska will transcend Springsteen, will immortalise him as a writer, because of what it says about civilisation in the range of its complexity--the beauty, the ugliness, the tenderness, the cruelty, the love, the hate, the doubt, the fear-- and because of what it says about the loneliness that lies at the heart of us all.

Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2007). The world: A history. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Brown, C. S. (2007). Big history: From the Big Bang to the present. New York: The New Press.

Between 1750 and 2000 the number of human beings increased from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.)

Even in Jericho, the oldest-known farming village, the walls, which were once believed to have been fortifications, are now thought to have been an early form of flood control.

most of human history (chronologically speaking) has taken place in communities quite innocent of state power.

With modern research, almost every aspect of the old edifice of human evolution,] the explanations of the development of modern man, domestication, metallurgy, urbanization and civilization - may in perspective emerge as semantic snares and metaphysical mirages.

But such monsters as sphinxes bring forth the necessary heroes to defeat them, and because such heroes make civilization by the example of monster-taming, without the former there would be no civilization at all.

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.