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"The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism."
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"If this is called civilization, then I am afraid humanity is no more civilized than the Tyrannosaurus Rex."

"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."

"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."

"The first requisite of civilization is that of justice."

"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."

"Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization."

"What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea."

"A civilized society is formed when every individual in that society are bound to obey the rules and regulation which is for the benefit of their own society."

"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."
Explore more quotes by Irving Babbitt


"Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards."


"A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism."


"The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people."


"If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism."


"For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual."


"To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy."


"We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective."


"A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog."


"A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice."
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