Quotes About Civilization

Few people realize that the dry Mediterranean region, including the original breadbasket of civilization in what is now Iraq, was once a forested ecosystem. When humans cut those forests thousands of years ago, rainfall became even more scarce than it already was and the entire region became and has remained an extremely fragile and far-less-productive desert-scrub ecosystem.

and that's what civilization is. It's not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers, and McDonalds; It's having enough security in your own faith and culture to allow people the sanctity of theirs . . .

Concord village was an outpost of urban civilization in the countryside.

The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

Rand, Nozick, and their more modern incarnations are dangerously wrong. Not only does the common good exist, but it is essential for a society to function. Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn't even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.

The renowned British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead recognized this inescapable quality of modern life when he asserted that "civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them." Take, for example, the "advance" offered to civilization by the discount coupon, which allows consumers to assume that they will receive a reduced purchase price by presenting the coupon.

Listen to today's Republicans and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. "Civilization has a simple choice," Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It's either "liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest" or "not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members." Sound familiar?

There can be no "free market" without government. The "free market" does not exist in the wilds beyond the reach of civilization. Competition in the wild is a contest for survival in which the largest and strongest typically win. Civilization, by contrast, is defined by rules; rules create markets, and governments generate the rules.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

I say, why start from nothing if you can start with everything? We've already got a civilization.' 'No. We haven't. We're just living on the edge of someone else's, like fleas on a dog's back. If the dog drowns, the fleas drown, too.

A species that runs into sustainability limits before it stabilizes its population is probably doomed. Massive starvation, failed technology, and a planet so depleted from the first bloom of civilization that it lacks the means to rebuild.

Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power.

We want to imagine ourselves not only as civilized and sophisticated but also as individuals with conscious control of much of what we do. Our group behavior tends to shatter this myth, and historical examples such as the Cultural Revolution frighten us with our own possibilities. We do not like to see ourselves as social animals operating under particular compulsions. It offends our self-opinion as a species.

All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.

Con quale velocità, pensò l'ingegnere, la natura si riprende ciò che ha dovuto cedere: pioggia e gelo sbriciolano la muratura, le strade sono sepolte da strati verdi di erbaccia, gli acquedotti sono ostruiti dalla stessa acqua per portare la quale sono stati costruiti. Quella della civiltà è un'incessante guerra che l'uomo è destinato a perdere.

BATHS WERE NOT a luxury. Baths were the foundation of civilisation. Baths were what raised even the meanest citizen of Rome above the level of the wealthiest hairy-arsed barbarian. Baths instilled the triple disciplines of cleanliness, healthfulness and strict routine.

A community where everyone is a ruthless murderer, with handy access to death-dealing devices, is a very polite community.

Civilization is a myth. That is the truth this world has taught us. We have not risen above our baser instincts... That is what always has and always will drive us.

We've been surviving in order to reach this moment, this discovery, the Hilltop... This is our future. We can rebuild civilization now. We're one step closer to getting back to the way things were before. We can be at peace again. We can raise our children again. We can love our families again.

The Church attitude is that civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

These two races hunted each other, lived and died for each other, and, through ignorance or guile, ignored any relationship between each other. The relationship was utterly symbiotic, but completely unacknowledged by either race. In fact, each race pretended that it alone was a Civilized Intelligence, and that the other was bestial, contemptible, and of no account. And it now occured to both of themthat they were, in equal measure, participants in the general concept of Humanity.