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"Civilization is the making of civil persons."
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"If this is called civilization, then I am afraid humanity is no more civilized than the Tyrannosaurus Rex."
"This grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on."
"After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection--not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again."
"Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables."
"Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war."
"I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt."
"Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization."
"Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights."
"Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex."
Explore more quotes by John Ruskin
"The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it."
"Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it."
"The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions."
"That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings."
"How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?"
"It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled."
"Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder."
"Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime."
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