Quotes About Civilization

You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky . . . You knew it, but even so it was hard to take it in.

Mankind is in grave danger, but democratic governments seem not to know what to do. If they do nothing, Western civilization, religious, personal and economic freedom are in grave danger

Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that convulsed Germany and at last drove Roosevelt to issue a public condemnation. He told reporters he "could scarcely believe that such a thing could occur in twentieth century civilization.

At stake was not only the British Empire but all of Christian civilization. "The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

When humor goes, there goes civilization

When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as religious as any other, this is what he meant: civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.

New means must be discovered to find room for us under the sun. Shall this be done by war or can it be done by peaceful methods? Or will we all have to move to Canada? Our deepest convictions—will Science upset them? Our civilization—is it inferior to older orders of things?

In the move from the village to the city, we became more free but also more alone. Individualism began its remorseless conquest of Western civilization. Mate selection became infused with romantic aspirations meant to counter the increasing isolation of modern life.

If you doubt how far our civilization has turned into a helpless self domesticated livestock, just look at the world around you

Human history, properly understood, starts when we move from being just another form of prey in the cycle of eat-and-be-eaten, a creature blown about by the natural world, to a creature beginning to shape the world. We move from happens-to, to makes-happen. But

Human history, properly understood, starts when we move from being just another form of prey in the cycle of eat-and-be-eaten, a creature blown about by the natural world, to a creature beginning to shape the world.

The Sumerians plotted the movements of the five planets they could see – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – and named a day after each. They then named one day after the Moon and another after the Sun, giving them a seven-day week.

The Sumerians also developed a counting system based on the number sixty, which is divisible by eleven other numbers and so particularly handy for Bronze Age accountancy. From this we get our 60-second minutes, 60-minute hours, 360-day years and 360-degree circles.

The words 'lost civilization of Atlantis' are muttered. This is how many modern Europeans like to think of their earlier selves – peaceable, artistic, liberated and romantically doomed – a story that is half-Eden and half the Titanic. But it is almost all bull.

In this, the people living in the Near East were especially fortunate. There are fifty-six edible grasses growing wild in the world – cereals like wheat, barley, corn and rice. Of those, no fewer than thirty-two grew on the hills and plains of the Fertile Crescent of today's southern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Iraq, compared with just four varieties apiece in Africa and America, and only one native variety, oats, in Western Europe.

The city was full of everything; it was an inspiring testament to man's ambition and a stark reminder of his animal past.

What's the delimiter between pyramid and ziggurat?

The city is built on an inhuman scale. Everything is by design inconvenient for Homo sapiens.

On THE DECSIVE DUEL: SPITFIRE VS 109 The epic struggle between the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt 109 upon which so much of western civilization depended in the summer of 1940 has found the ideal biographer in David Isby. I write "biographer" because, like the men who flew these remarkable fighter planes, Isby sees them in almost human terms, transcending the mere mechanical. (Andrew Roberts, Author Of The Storm Of War )

Churchill sustituyó la religión ortodoxa por una fe laica en el progreso histórico, con un marcado énfasis en la misión civilizadora de Inglaterra y el imperio británico».

Life here is so elemental. So real. Without the interference of civilization you can really experience things like,...silence. Silence and darkness in its purity. Right now, right outside my window all I can see is a black void. Endless darkness. It's totally exhilarating, and I feel very lucky to be here. Very, very lucky.

A nation that has forgotten the quality of leadership it took to make a civilization great in the past is not likely to insist on greatness in its leaders today.