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Civilization Quotes
"Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not."
28
"The story of the herd of seals. Hundreds of them on a beach; among them the hunter killing one after the other with a club. Together they could easily have crushed him- but they lay there, watching him come to murder, and did not move; he was only killing a neighbor- one neighbor after the other. The story of the European seals. The sunset of civilization. Tired shapeless Götterdämmerung. The empty banners of human rights. The sell-out of a continent. The onrushing deluge. The haggling for the last prices. The old dance of despair on the volcano. Peoples again slowly being driven into a slaughterhouse. The fleas would save themselves when the sheep were being sacrificed. As always."
28
"Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others."
28
"Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta."
28
"I would say practical progressive, which means that the Republican party or any political party has got to recognize the problems of a growing and complex industrial civilization. And I don't think the Republican party is really wide awake to that."
26
"To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori..."
26
"Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization."
26
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
26
"Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity."
25
"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."
25
"Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants."
25
"Adoration is a sign of an infant civilization."
24
"Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization."
24
"We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles."
23
"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."
23
"A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance."
22
"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."
21
"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."
21
"The human civilization has gone extremely so far; that in return, we have lost the line between stupidity and spirituality."
20
"A civilization is built upon the edifice of genuine human minds, not the primitive and deluded minds of barbarian apes, who in most cases read one book of opinions written hundreds or thousands of years ago and think that they have factual answers to all the questions in the world."
20
"This civilization is the impact of the world's consumption behavior."
19
"Civilization is communication. When that which should be expressed and transmitted is lost, civilization comes to an end."
19
"All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization."
19
"Handwriting enables civilization."
19
"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."
19
"In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every person that's walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in it's place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists-the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings."
18
"Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization."
18
"Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that the lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference."
18
"Knowledge is the key driver of the progress of civilization."
18
"In this century, we are about to enter interplanetary civilization.In order to survive, we need to go beyond neoclassical economics definition.We define it as interplanomics."
18
"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization."
18
"For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization."
17
"Civilization could not exist without tremors of desire and without the counteracting, negation force of disciplined denial. Nor would the gyratory pulsations of a lively civilization exist devoid of the convulsive chemistry of union and repellency. We are born with a desire to be immortal. Cursed with the knowledge that we must die, people live their orthodox lives out by displaying reckless abandon as to the outcome of human life or nervously hounded by utter despondency nipping their heels. How we resolve this decidedly human complex of carrying out our daily lives while burden by our inescapable mortality determines our essential character. The collation of similar values adopted by our community determines who we are as a people."
17
"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."
17
"When all men give to all others all the rights they claim for themselves, this world will be civilized."
17
"Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization."
17
"The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."
16
"Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex."
16
"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."
16
"No civilization can thrive or survive if it refuses to adapt or change."
15
"It ain't technology that enhances the civilization..but the way mankind perceives nature from all standpoints."
15
"There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man's mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City."
15
"The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations - and absolutely nothing more."
15
"Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind."
15
"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."
15
"Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization."
15
"Science is a trigger of changes of civilization. Religion is the failsafe of science performance."
15
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