Best 2527 quotes in «civilization quotes» category

Transcendence gets you beyond ego. If you go beyond ego, you see all of this in a more decent perspective and you can start to put all the pieces together. We haven't done that yet. Not as a civilization.

Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.

Tribalism is the most powerful force in the world.

True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read.

Truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism.

Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it.

Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.

Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.

Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition, and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.

Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach.

Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors--is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.

Understanding the times means understanding the course of history and civilization, as well as understanding the present situation. If we understand how God guides the development of human history, we can begin to understand the therapies needed to correct the problems of our times.

Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. Civilization is falling from me little by little. I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very little hatred for my neighbor - rather, to love him.

University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.

Unless man has the wit and the grit to build his civilization on something better than material power, it is surely idle to talk of plans for a stable peace.

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.

Unity in diversity is the highest possible attainment of a civilization, a testimony to the most noble possibilities of the human race. This attainment is made possible through passionate concern for choice, in an atmosphere of social trust.

Unless we redesign our civilization in numerous ways, all of the science in the world won't save us.

Unless we stop the degradation of our oceans, marine ecological systems will begin collapsing and when enough of them fail, the oceans will die. And if the oceans die, then civilization collapses and we all die

Unlike most heritages, Western civilization is not primarily a geographical place or a genetic bloodline. It is a state of mind. No matter where on earth one was born, to become heir to Western civilization's ancestry, one need only pledge allegiance to reason and individual liberty-the civilized, life-affirming values that represent the "West at its best.

Unshined shoes are the end of civilization.

Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends-the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.

Vanity as an impulse has without doubt been of far more benefit to civilization than modesty has ever been.

Usually without realizing it, our ultimate peace starts and ends in the authority of God alone, which means the solution to living in joy, peace, and harmony with our fellow men has been here for all since the beginning of mankind and throughout civilization. I have yet to feel the urge to argue politics: it reminds me of getting off the freeway to sit in raging traffic.

Very few Black people ever embraced back to Africa movements, and very few actually, a tiny number actually went back to Africa. They said, "We are going to make America live up to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States." They produced one of the world's great cultures; they produced individuals who were just as brilliant and made contributions to the world civilization. In fact, they produced a world-class civilization, the African American civilization, in music, in dance, in oratory, in religion, in writing.

War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with. ... But it is not only a biological law but a moral obligation and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization.

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.

Virtually every advancement made by our species since civilization first peeked out of its nest of stone has been initiated by lone individuals, mavericks who more often than not were ignored, mocked, or viciously persecuted by society and its institutions.

Volumptuous women look good. Ignorant messages from mass media tell women what size to be, but female qualities-a softness, a soothing capacity that a woman has no matter what size she happens to be-sustain the more humane aspects of civilization.

Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been more constant in history than war.

War is a damnable, filthy thing and has destroyed civilization after civilization

War is, we have been forced to admit, even in the face of its huge place in our civilization, an asocial trait.

Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait.

We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We're kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.

We all flow from one fountain- Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

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.

We are compelled to work more hours per day, receive less pay per hour, pay more for what we buy, and recieve less for what we sell. The consequence is that we must work harder and more hours per day than we should, and in the end have less than what is due to us as our part of the advantages, conveniences and opportunities resulting from advancing civilization.

We are in an unusual predicament as a global civilization. The maximum that is politically feasible, even the maximum that is politically imaginable right now, still falls short of the minimum that is scientifically and ecologically necessary.

We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words ‘Too Late’.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

We are in the twilight of this earth. The societies and civilizations of human beings will not endure much longer because of their abuses of power.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

We are not a civilized country if we can read in a newspaper what a lady tells her boyfriend or husband.

We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers.

We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.