Quotes About Civilization

Anthropology was the study of humanity. Susannah's interest lay in the way human beings related to each other and their environments at various periods of history.

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.

Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

Unsere Zivilisation ist durch das Wort Fortschritt charakterisiert. Der Fortschritt ist ihre Form nicht eine ihrer Eigenschaften daß sie fortschrietet. Sie ist typisch aufbauend. Ihre Tätigkeit ist es ein immer komplizierteres Gebilde zu konstruieren. Und auch die Klarheit dient doch nur wieder diesem Zweck und ist nicht Selbstzweck. Mir dagegen ist die Klarheit, die Durchsichtigkeit, Selbstzweck.

Whatever action we take may influence the course of civilization.

The ancients had instincts and abilities that are lost to civilization today. Magic was real. It lived inside the shamans. Inside the priests. They passed it on from generation to generation. You have the dregs of that power in you. It it not the strength that it was, but you can access it. But to do so you must be willing to travel deep into your own darkness and be open to risk. To pull from the earth's energy.

Santa curiosidade! Tu não és só a alma da civilização, és também o pomo da concórdia, fruta divina, de outro sabor que não aquele pomo da mitologia.

And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.

There's something truly strange about living in a historical moment in which the conservative anxiety and despair about queers bringing down civilization and its institutions (marriage, most notably) is met by the anxiety and despair so many queers feel about the failure or incapacity of queerness to bring down civilization and its institutions.

Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from

Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days, it'd die of remorse on the third—

Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes. Christendom has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite. Our barbarians are home products, indoctrinated at the public expense, urged on by the media systematically stage by stage, dismantling Christendom, depreciating and deprecating all its values.

I must also leave you to analyze the cultural decline of Western art and literature. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as a priest and ends as a clown or buffoon. Examples of buffoonery in twentieth-century art, literature and music are many: Dali, Picasso, John Cage, Beckett.

I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if aware of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathise with the bears.

Teachers must be celebrated for moving civilization from ignorance to enlightenment, from apathy to responsibility.

What do I consider a teacher should be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress and civilization.

To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.

Teachers are more than any other group the guardians of civilization.

Gingrich - primary mission Advocate of civilization Definer of civilization Teacher of the Rules of Civilization... Leader (Possibly) of the civilizing forces...

We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.

La nature d'une civilisation, c'est ce qui s'agrège autour d'une religion. Notre civilisation est incapable de construire un temple ou un tombeau. Elle sera contrainte de trouver sa valeur fondamentale, ou elle se décomposera.

punishment evokes sexual feelings in him; skin is logically connected in his mind with force, because sex is what he feels when he feels the urge to hurt her. [...] Force is suggested by the skin, because both to him mean real touch; [...] still conditioned by civilization to have abstract sexual impulses, he is drawn most by the silhouette, halfway between the fictive and the real.

Modern mass culture, aimed at the consumer, the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being