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"No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion."
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Exlpore more Civilization quotes
"Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell."
"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."
"If this is called civilization, then I am afraid humanity is no more civilized than the Tyrannosaurus Rex."
"The majority of India's adult and elderly population is too medieval to think as civilized, rational and progressive human beings."
"In the world of primitive savages, religion and bigotry go hand in hand. But, in the world of civilized humans, religion and reason must go hand in hand."
"Education is not the amount of information that is pushed into the brain and causes havoc there, undigested all through a lifetime. Education must be a symposium of life-building, character- making and assimilation of ideas in the pursuit of building a more harmonious, peaceful and truly civilized world."
"Libraries, museums, universities, everything we designed and built over six thousand years. Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured."
"There is nothing more savage than modern civilization."
"Advanced weaponry, victories in battle and space travel do not an advanced species or civilization make."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Christopher Dawson
"Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one."
"But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them."
"The Church as a divine society possess an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them."
"Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum."
"You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for."
"The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution."
"And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens."
"As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism."
"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy."
"American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World."
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