Quotes About Civilization

[M]odern man is just ancient man... with way better electronics.

Use of advanced messaging technology does not imply an endorsement of western industrial civilization.

Ab urbe condita [Since the founding of the city (Rome)].

La historia de nuestra civilización es, hasta cierto punto, la historia de un esfuerzo persuasivo por extender los mejores «sentimientos morales» a círculos cada vez más amplios de humanidad

We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it'll end slow. Ours is already ending, it's just ending too slow for people to notice.

Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it'll end slow. Ours is already ending, it's just ending too slow for people to notice.

Especially during wartime, such things remain important. They are what separate the civilized man from the barbarian.

Perhaps a third of the population of Italy were slaves in the late Republic—as many as three million people.

He traced his lineage to the splendid, mysterious Etruscan civilization, based in today's Tuscany

The eastern half of the empire spoke Greek and boasted a culture that went back to Homer.

it was unnerving that a stronghold of barbarism should lie so dangerously close to civilized Italy.

the Roman state was remarkably nonbureaucratic; with no police force

For all the wonders of ancient Athens, or rather because of them, I faced a fundamental question. How was it that this tiny community of 200,000 souls or so (in other words, no more populous than, say, York in England or Little Rock in Arkansas) managed to give birth to towering geniuses across the range of human endeavor and to create one of the greatest civilizations in history? Indeed, it laid the foundations of our own contemporary intellectual universe.

I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we're here. And we're trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization.

By bringing out into the public domain how human institutions actually behave, we can understand frankly, to a degree, for the first time the civilization that we actually have.

To me, education is not a commodity. It is a public good, essential to any society with a claim to being civilised.

Our civilization, such as it is, was shaped by religion, and the men who aspire to public office anyplace in the free world must make obeisance to God or risk immediate opprobrium.

The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicised so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy.

Words are the essence of culture. Books are pure essence. They are not for women or for men, but for all of us. Without books, civilisation falls into the dark ages.

The city of the future development will be shifted from the pursuit of material civilisation to the pursuit of nature. This is what happens after human beings experience industrial civilisation at the expense of the natural environment.

Democracy rests upon two pillars: one, the principle that all men are equally entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and the other, the conviction that such equal opportunity will most advance civilization.