Quotes About Civilization

America, has fallen in the grip of the most portentous cycle in the history of mankind.

Energy efficiency is a tactic for slowing the process of overshooting environmental limits, but the urgent work facing our civilization is to use the time we gain to build richer, more resilient kinds of buildings that serve the common good.

Have I not reason to lamentWhat man has made of man?

this observation leads Rozin to a stunning conclusion: "Disgust is the basic emotion of civilization.

A chair is the first thing you need when you don't really need anything and is, therefore, a particularly compelling symbol of civilisation. (Attributed to Ralph Caplan)

The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually

Our civilization cannot survive materially unless it is redeemed spiritually. It can be saved only by becoming permeated with the Spirit of Christ, and being made free and happy by practices which spring out of that spirit. Only thus can discontent be driven out and all shadows lifted from the road ahead.

if Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation [and] it would check his policy for a better international ethical code

Feminism was recognized by the average man as a conflict in which it was impossible for a man, as a chivalrous gentleman, as a respecter of the rights of little nations (like little Belgium), as a highly evolved citizen of a highly civilized community, to refuse the claim of this better half to self-determination.

The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

Life has rules, Omar, and without some of them, humanity would return to the Stone Age.

The basis of drama is ... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realizes that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilization and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.

Be they pharaohs or freeholders, barons or farmers, landowners have been the most capable, most intrepid, and most assertive members of civilized society.

It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.

both natural selection and the historical record offer powerful reasons for doubting the trustworthiness of our naive moral intuitions. So the possibility that human civilisation might be founded upon some monstrous evil should be taken seriously - even if the possibility seems transparently absurd at the time.

Another way to comprehend it is this: From the time of our beginning as a species (about 200,000 years ago) until the year 1804, human population rose to a billion; between 1804 and 1927, it rose by another billion; we reached 3 billion in 1960; and each net addition of a billion people, since then, has taken only about thirteen years. In October 2011, we came to the 7-billion mark

the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

If we illegally detain Altek, the threat we face is to our way of life. We cannot selectively enforce our laws. To do so diminishes us as a civilization, and lowers us to the moral and ethical ranks of those who oppose us.

Trying to save Western society was exhausting.

a few must die so the rest can live in peace, well, such is the ugly but unavoidable cost of living in a civilized society. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

The invention of the mechanical clock was one of a number of major advances that turned Europe from a weak, peripheral, highly vulnerable outpost of Mediterranean civilization into a hegemonic aggressor.

Our word "Phoenician" comes from ancient Greek. Phoinikes, "red people," was what the Greeks called them, probably in reference to their copper skin color.

Modern experts now believe the alphabet was invented sometime around 2000 B.C. by Semites who dwelled as foreigners in pharaoh's Egypt;

Long ago, in the infancy of civilization, man learned that there were drugs in Nature, cell products of the growth or transformation of "our brother organisms, the plants," by whose agency pain was turned to pleasure. By the aid of these outside influences he could clear "today of past regrets and future fears," and strike out from the sad "calendar unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday.