Quotes About Civilization

Our language, history, and civilization shine out across every continent.

As much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace. Football is a kind of Geiger counter of civilisation, or a catalyst for good as well as bad.

It seems like every year Hollywood makes an attempt to retell the Manson story, and I just couldn't be less interested in it. It's not really our crowning achievement as a civilisation. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it just bores me.

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

People now know how important it is to build secure systems to underlie our civilization.

It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.

Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems. Carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.

Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.

Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.

Hope for what? I don't know. Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization.

Quid salvum est si Roma perit?" What is safe if Rome perishes?

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of a civilization. On the contrary, absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.

Loving comfort, risking little, terrified by the thought of change, (the middle class') aim is to establish a materialistic civilization which will banish threats to its complacency. It has conventions, not ideals; it is washed rather than clean. Thus the final degradation of the Baconian philosophy is that knowledge becomes power in the service of appetite.

The wild gatecrashes our civilised domains, and the domesticated escapes and runs riot. Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life - and the course of evolution itself - refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In doing so they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.

In the history of mankind, the fine art of killing one another in a civilized and uniformed manner has been elusive.

What else are we going to do? An alien starship, Bartolomeo. As far as we know, this is the first and only time in human history that we have had any contact, any evidence of an intelligent alien civilization. We can't just stop now, leave it all behind as if it didn't exist." That

Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

Brillat-Savarin and Symons were right to say that we have tamed nature with fire. We should indeed pin our humanity on cooks.