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"Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down."
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"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."

"What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete."

"Advanced weaponry, victories in battle and space travel do not an advanced species or civilization make."
Explore more quotes by Edward Abbey

"And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain."

"What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."

"A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis."

"Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness."
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