Quotes About Civilization

In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever, that the most peaceful prosperity will someday have to end, or maybe it's just human nature

From somewhere, in college, Pip had gotten the idea—her mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by—that the height of civilization was to spend Sunday morning reading an actual paper copy of the Sunday New York Times at a café. This had become her weekly ritual, and, in truth

Never mind what's going on underneath. As long as we're all 'civil.

Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.

I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

Za posledních tÃ…â"¢i a p?l tisíce let bylo v celém civilizovaném svÄ›tÄ› jenom dvÄ› stÄ› tÃ…â"¢icet let míru.

the entirety of human society and moral progress represents an explicit transcendence of what's "natural.

Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right.   Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!

Capitalism does not merely mean that the housewife may influence production by her choice between peas and beans; or that plant managers have some voice in deciding what and how to produce: it means a scheme of values, an attitude toward life, a civilization—the civilization of inequality and of the family fortune.

The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.

Mythology -and therefore civilization- is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels.

THE SANE METHOD OF STUDYING HISTORY consists (or wd. if it were ever practised, consist) in learning what certain great protagonists intended, and to what degree they failed in forcing their program on the mass. For example:…J. Q. Adams' intention of conserving national wealth for purposes of national education and civilization… Jefferson's continual struggle to import civilization from Europe (getting measurements of la Maison Carrée…)

That is of course a purely eighteenth-century, patriarchal, and un-Native American model of civilization. One might even call it European, if it were not that the monarchical European way, in Jefferson's view, was 'to keep [the people] down' by hard labour, poverty, ignorance

There are no traces of the Hittites at Shechem or on the eastern side of the Jordan

We must regard the Amorites as the earlier population, among a part of whom the Hittites in later days settled and intermarried.

We Venusians are sturdier than that. One can't even become part of the Protectorate until we've survived, naked and unarmed, in the harshest jungles of Venus. Only after a warrior crawls into civilization wearing the pelt of the fearsome screeching five-horned fiend do they pass the test.

Publishing is not, of course, dependent on the individual taste of the publisher," Perkins replied to one reader of Hemingway's novel. "He is under an obligation to his profession which binds him to bring out a work which in the judgment of the literary world is significant in its literary qualities and is a pertinent criticism of the civilization of the time.

America didn't bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

Europe is a place that conserves. It maintains, it curates its civilization, protects it against the ravages and rust of other cultures, and the rot of time and intellectual theft. We are a continent where fear of losing what we have is greater than the ambition to make it anew.

There is a name for this sudden slap of art, this falling through the rabbit hole of civilisation. It's Stendhal's syndrome: being overcome by beauty. They say that the guards in the Uffizi are trained to deal with collapsing Americans who have lived lives of blameless comfort in Midwestern ugliness and can't compute the full beam of a Bronzino.

an intellectual betrayed his mission if he was not the most constant defender of civilization and freedom of thought

Todos los males del alma humana provienen del temor y del deseo. Las amenazas y las promesas son los grandes medios de corromper y embrutecer a los hombres. El dogma que anuncia el privilegio y que amenaza con un castigo exorbitante, monstruoso y sin fin a las multitudes ignorantes no es ni divino, ni humano, ni razonable, ni civilizador

Arabic equals Sanskrit plus history, equals Greek minus tragedy