Civilization Quotations | Page 2

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

People here always said to me, Why would you leave civilization to go to a place like Fiji? Fiji is a far more civilized place than California or New York City.

Well, we can't afford blindness anymore. There are tens of thousands of thugs who loathe liberty and love death, and want to annihilate Western civilization.

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.

Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time.

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.

The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization.

The destiny of world civilization depends upon providing a decent standard of living for all mankind.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.

Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us.

Gorillas are almost altruistic in nature. There's very little if any 'me-itis.' When I get back to civilization I'm always appalled by 'me, me, me.'

The test of civilization is its estimate of women.

I remember the moon landings, and Apollo was the paradigm by which all progress was measured at that time. And I knew that creating a true space-faring civilization was both possible and practical. What I failed to realize was that the effort would fail due to bureaucratic inertia and political apathy.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.

Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book 'The Reactionary Mind,' that the direction of human history is not on their side - that is why they are reactionaries - because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

I feel this is very important for us to have serene buildings because our civilization is chaotic as it is, you see; our whole machine age has brought about a chaos that has to be somehow counterbalanced, I think.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

I remind everybody that the Sabbath was the Jewish gift to civilization.

Civilization, we shall find, like Universalism and Christianity, is anti evolutionary in its effects; it works against the laws and conditions which regulated the earlier stages of man's ascent.

I have always believed that resistance against repression and violence is possible without relying on similar repression and violence. I have always believed that human civilization is the fruit of the effort of both women and men.

Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?

The American economic, political, and social organization has given to its citizens the benefits of material prosperity, political liberty, and a wholesome natural equality; and this achievement is a gain, not only to Americans, but to the world and to civilization.

The disease of mutual distrust among nations is the bane of modern civilization

Human civilization has been changing the Earths environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.

Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.

Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

I believe that what we are fighting here is not just a small group of people who have hijacked a religion, but it is a civilization bent on destroying ours.

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations, both ancient and modern.

Hold fast to the Bible. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization and to this we must look as our guide in the future.

I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.

I believe Costco does more for civilization than the Rockefeller Foundation. I think it's a better place. You get a bunch of very intelligent people sitting around trying to do good, I immediately get kind of suspicious and squirm in my seat.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

While I have no empirical evidence to back this up, I bet that the number of homosexual people per thousand has not fluctuated all that much over the centuries. I do not believe the dented wisdom my father used to extol, that homosexuality was a sure sign of a civilization in decline.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved.

I am studying ancient civilizations, trying to find what happened to them, finding out why they went into a decline, why they died.

The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

The habit of collecting, of attachment to things, is an essential human trait. But Western civilization put collecting on a pedestal by inventing museums. Museums are about representing power. It could be the king's power or, later, people's power.

There are many, many communities, many ethnic minorities, many civilizations that have been brutalised by others and you have to move on. You cannot perpetually stay in that place of blame, otherwise it's just a downward spiral.

Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.

We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so.

Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization.

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.

Since the dawn of time, traditional marriage - the union between one man and one woman - has been the building block of civilization, and at no point in our nation's history has that foundation been under more severe attack than now.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

The role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless... Islam was as guilty as all the rest.

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.

What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.

We live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and ... it's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations that we're seeing the current manifestations of.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise.

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

Story was that human civilization started to develop with first social network. Emerged where population concentration was high. Helped propel to where we are now. Facebook is next step of creating a huge human brain to embrace hundreds of million, possibly billions of people.

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.

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.

Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark.

Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply.

As the publisher of the 'Tory,' I strive to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.

For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.

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

Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease or any other chronic disease of civilization.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology

We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.