Quotes About Civilization

An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.

The very existence of Athens, however peaceful, is a deadly threat to Sparta's stasis. And therefore, in the long run, the condition for the continued stasis of Sparta (which means its continued existence, as they see it) is the destruction of progress in Athens (which from our perspective would constitute the destruction of Athens).

the assumption that progress in a hypothetical rapacious civilization is limited by raw materials rather than by knowledge.

Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.

By the time that the war came to an end, British society was generally inclined to reject the idealistic case for imperialism (that it would extend the benefits of advanced civilization to a backward region) as quixotic, and the practical case for it (that it would be of benefit to Britain to expand her empire) as untrue.

America is closer to the year 2 than anywhere else on earth.

Everyday we wake up and collectively make a world together; but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?

There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

Why the West Rules – For Now

Jean-Jacques Rousseau left us a story about the origins of social inequality that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day. It is the story of humanity's original innocence, and unwitting departure from a state fo pristine simplicity on a voyage of technological discovery that would ultimately guarantee both our 'complexity' and our enslavement. How did this ambivalent story of civilization come about?

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

We already know how this one goes. Humans were once living a 'fairly comfortable life', subsisting from the blessings of Nature, but then we made our most fatal mistake. Lured by the prospect of a still easier life - of surplus and luxury, or living like gods - we had to go and tamper with hat harmonious State of Nature, and thus unwittingly turned ourselves into slaves.

140 What until now has passed for 'civilization' might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.

Civilization' came as a package. It meant misery and suffering for some (since some would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debt peons), but also allowed for the possibility of philosophy, art and the accumulation of scientific knowledge. The evidence no longer suggests anything of the sort.

if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the 'tribal' stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety.25 But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker's conclusions.

If mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others are the kind of things that really go to make civilizations, then this true history of civilization is only just starting to be written.

There's a reason why, in English, the words 'politics' 'polite' and 'police' all sound the same – they're all derived from the Greek word polis, or city, the Latin equivalent of which is civitas, which also gives us 'civility,' 'civic' and a certain modern understanding of 'civilization'.

Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind

We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself.

Our civilization overflows with charity—which is simply willingness to hand back to labor as generous gracious alms a small part of the loot from the just wages of labor. But of real help—just wages for honest labor—there is little, for real help would disarrange the system, would abolish the upper classes. She

Around six thousand to seven thousand years ago, sea level stabilized after a multithousand-year period of rapid rise. The first large coastal settlements on several continents all date to this period. The high-protein fish diets made possible by stable sea level and consequent coastal settlement contributed to the rise of complex societies around the world. In

Americans, wrote a historian of the period, were in general so ignorant of the realities on the ground that 'when the Palestinians rose up in resistance they were able to see the Zionists' increasingly aggressive, colonialist behaviour as a defence of democracy and other progressive Western ideals', while this 'Palestinian resistance to imperialist invasion became a form of unwarranted offense against civilization'.28

In this view, capitalism—the system that supports the democracies of the West and has raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of human beings to levels that only royalty enjoyed in the past—is barbarism, while the system that murdered millions and impoverished whole continents is civilization.