Quotes About Civilization

Obliger a penser tout seul, voila une definition possible de la culture classique. Une civilisation n'est belle que dans la mesure ou il y a une circulation naturelle entre les oeuvres de ses grands hommes et la vie intime de ses individus et de ses foyers.

While other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to the formation of a new government. Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.

The speech lacked soaring cadences or memorable lines, yet it touched on two explosive issues at the finale. He advised Native Americans that their days as a hunting, gathering people were numbered and that he favored "civilization, christianization and ultimate citizenship" for them.89 Then, in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Grant championed black suffrage.

children will be able to tell than the story we have told? Surely that is the greatest contribution of science to civilization: to ensure that the greatest books are not those of the past, but of the future.

Before we pass judgment on the Germans let me say that I have never found an American who has expressed personal guilt over the fact that we destroyed a people and their civilization in brutal indifference to gain the North American continent.

Aquel pueblo avanzaba con una decisión que arrastraba consigo todas las simpatías del mundo civilizado. La joven Israel se alzaba como un faro para la humanidad, demostrando cuánto se podía conseguir con fuerza de voluntad y amor.

Our species had to engage in complex cooperative behavior in order to survive in the wild, and—as I keep reminding my teenage children—pointing and grunting get you only so far.

Today we call our subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, or "Wise, Wise Man.

No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy—not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams—which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

In many respects, the West has not recovered from the Middle Ages.

In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible?

The occurrence of monotheism, codified law, and the alphabet all at the same moment in history cannot have been coincidental…. The abstractness of all three innovations were mutually reinforcing. —Robert Logan

The one elementary but elemental factor in all civilizations that collapsed into extinction is the failure to read the handwriting on the wall, the failure to respond to warning signs. Every extinct culture hurled signs high into the heavens for all to see. But every collapsing culture failed to read and heed these flares.52

But the noblest painters,—Michelangelo and Raphael, Titian and Leonardo,—in addition to possessing the solid grasp of technical mastery, reflected some aspect of their nation's life and civilization.

But more and more Memphis had begun to ask himself if there had ever been order, or if order was one more myth people repeated so they didn't have to think too much about the violence lurking just under the surface of every polite exchange, every façade of "civilization." And just whom did "order" serve?

We are born charming fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.

If a society does not wage a common struggle to attain a common goal with its women and men, scientifically there is no way for it to become civilized or developed.

The first man to fence in a piece of land, saying "this is mine" and who found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

Through the centuries, men of law have been persistently concerned with the resolution of disputes in ways that enable society to achieve its goals with a minimum of force and maximum of reason.

History is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point.

Libraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society.

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.

An orderly society cannot exist if every man may decide which laws he will obey.

Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.