Quotes About Civilization

The Incas were right to worship the sun, Father. God is fire. Combustion is the one inarguable blessing. A tree, oil, coal, a man, a civilization, a soul. They've all got to burn sometime. The warmth made by their passing may be the salvation of others. The ultimate value of the Bible, the Constitution, or any work of literature, really, is that they all burn very well, and for a while they keep back the cold.

The Incas were right to worship the sun, Father," the Fireman said to Father Storey. "God is fire. Combustion is the one inarguable blessing. A tree, oil, coal, a man, a civilization, a soul. They've all got to burn sometime. The warmth made by their passing may be the salvation of others. The ultimate value of the Bible, or the Constitution, or any work of literature, really, is that they all burn very well, and for a while they keep back the cold.

Harry Truman and the United States saved the free world." Churchill's declaration that Truman saved civilization itself is perhaps the greatest tribute to the thirty-third president, a historical giant dismissed in his time as a strange, little man.

The Sumerians, living five thousand years ago in what is now Iran, are commonly believed to be the world's first civilization.

When civilisation declined, it was the women who always suffered most.

People are individuals, not groups. We either live together as such, or we abandon any hope of civilisation.

There are always those prepared to sacrifice civilised principles for personal gain,

I believe most people are inherently good, but overcoming our nature is what separates us from the animals.

The word "school" has a curious history behind it. Meaning originally "leisure" it has now acquired precisely the opposite sense of systematic work and training, as civilization restricted the free disposal of the young man's time more and more and herded larger and larger classes of the young to a daily life of severe application from childhood onwards.

real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted.

World history is the world's court.

Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them.

It [is of] some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.

Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

It's too hard a life for me. I could only do it - check out in that sense - if I checked out somewhere that was luxurious and within hailing distance of civilization.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

Country things are the necessary root of our life - and that remains true even of a rootless and tragically urban civilization. To live permanently away from the country is a form of slow death.

The realization of justice is, in the actual state of things, a matter of life or death for society and for civilisation itself.

Great empires require great religions.

Since man is a rational creature, he can only attain freedom through the exercise of his reason, something more difficult in the primitive state than in civilization.