Quotes About Civilization

Hancock: You're not particularly bothered about the impending stagnation of Western Civilization, are you? Sid: No, not really. As long as my horses don't stagnate I don't care what happens. Hancock: Exactly. The struggle of the human race is nothing compared with your struggle up to the two-bob window at Cheltenham, is it? Sid: No, it's not.

for it is this modern Occidental civilization which, since about the middle of the thirteenth century, has been—quite literally—the only innovating civilization in the world.

there has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even disdain for those ritual forms that once brought forth, and up to now have sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilization. There is a ridiculous nature-boy sentimentalism that with increasing force is taking over. Its beginnings date back to the eighteenth century of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with its artificial back-to-nature movements and conceptions of the Noble Savage.

The one who watches athletic games instead of participating in athletics is involved in a surrogate achievement. But when you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it's a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families—well, it's a life-extinguishing affair.

there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.

systematically murderous totalitarian system of all, conspired in their own death, was yet a fourth savant-idiot. The classic American savant-idiot, surely, was Susan Sontag. This is the Susan Sontag who called white civilization "the cancer of human history";

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his 'Every Change Is for the Worse' should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.

As the Son rose on Christian civilization, the Blessed Virgin emerged as the mother of poetry as she is the Mother of God in the magnificence of the Magnificat, and St. John, her divinely appointed son, is revealed as the progenitor of Christian metaphysical poetry in the opening lines of his Gospel and in the mystical majesty of his apocalyptic vision.

Clearly, boxing's very image is repulsive to many people because it cannot be assimilated into what we wish to know about civilized man. In a technological society possessed of incalculably refined methods of mass destruction (consider how many times over the United States and the Soviet Union have vaporized each other in fantasy) boxing's display of direct unmitigated and seemingly natural aggression is too explicit to be tolerated.

Civilization is faces, appearances: when these collapse, civilization collapses as well.

You may put this in your interview, Miss Fife, that Robert Frost believes in civilization—which is to say the Caucasian civilization." "But

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

GENTLE READER: You, sir, are an anarchist, and Miss Manners is frightened to have anything to do with you. It is true that questioning the table manners of others is rude. But to overthrow the accepted conventions of society, on the flimsy grounds that you have found them silly, inefficient and discomforting, is a dangerous step toward destroying civilization.

Ne tuhaf deÄŸil mi? diye devam etti.Biz kibarlar, uygar davran??lar?m?zla övünürüz ama birbirimizi yemeyi en güzel yemeklere tercih ederiz.

The truest evidence that any civilization ever leaves behind about itself is its art. Art never lies.

Nothing better is possible until we cease to be mental savages in industry and business, and become men and women. This can only come about by the rise of the whole race to a higher viewpoint. And this can only come about by the rise of such individuals here and there as are ready for the higher viewpoint.

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.

Civilizations grow and change and decline - they aren't remade.

This spirit of tolerance and understanding has been from the beginning one of the most cherished ideals of Buddhist culture and civilization. That is why there is not a single example of persecution or the shedding of a drop of blood in converting people to Buddhism, or in its propagation during its long history of 2500 years. It spread peacefully all over the continent of Asia, having more than 500 million adherents today.

A slight daily unconscious LUXURY is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.