Best 2527 quotes in «civilization quotes» category

Marriage is the beginning and pinnacle of civilization.

Marriage is under attack from so many different areas. There should be benefits associated with married people. Life is unfair. Maybe you won't find the right person and you won't end up getting married. Oh, well, life is unfair. But married people, because of their capacity to have children, even if they're not going to end up having children, even if they're unable to bear children, marriage is an institution that is absolutely central to civilization.

Marriage is the basic building block of civilization. We are redefining it at our own peril.

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

Material civilization, nay, even luxury, is necessary to create work for the poor. Bread! Bread! I do not believe in a God who cannot give me bread here, giving me eternal bliss in heaven!

Maybe they didn't want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away all that's left is some story in a history class.

Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization.

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.

Modern civilization has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise.

Modern civilization has no understanding of sacred matters. Everything is backwards.

Modern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.

Modern prophets say that our economics have failed us. No! It is not our economics which have failed; it is man who has failed-man who has forgotten God. Hence no manner of economic or political readjustment can possibly save our civilization; we can be saved only by a renovation of the inner man, only by a purging of our hearts and souls; for only by seeking first the Kingdom of God and His Justice will all these other things be added unto us.

Modern civilization is a product of an energy binge. Binges often end in hangovers.

Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it's an endless stalemate.

Monuments and archaeological pieces serve as testimonies of man's greatness and establish a dialogue between civilizations showing the extent to which human beings are linked.

Money is the most important subject intellectual persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it is widely understood and its defects remedied very soon.

More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else...All our lauded technological progress-our very civilization-is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.

Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit.

Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive.

More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.

Most historians accept that Egypt was a cradle of civilization, and that many cultural idioms and traditions come from there. What has yet to be understood, however, is the manner in which Egypt inherited its cultural elements from the lands of the North-West. This fact is not known today because of the threat it poses to Rome and London, the Vatican and Crown, and to all those who have profited from the suppression of knowledge.

Most of the scientists I know think civilization is teetering on the brink of a global disaster. They just don't know when it's going to hit. I don't have the answer to that either. I'm scared as hell.

Most societies wipe themselves out and it's interesting to read about the last days of past civilizations. You'll note that the last days of past civilizations were filled with idiotic, irrational ideas and behaviors that couldn't be explained by reason.

Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.

"Motherboard," for me, has four different levels: the bottom part is the water, vegetation, and growth. The second part is the world with figures and animals; there's chaos and civilization. The third part is the digital zone - these red things are turning into really loud digital sounds. Then the fourth level is like ether and things turning into air. This idea of how we're becoming partly digitalized is really interesting to me.

Movies are to our civilization what dreams and ideals are to individual lives: They express the mystery and help define the nature of who we are and what we are becoming.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Music has power to create a universe or to destroy a civilization.

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

Muslims stand by their religion entirely. It is a sort of religious absolutism. While Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization. They confuse tolerance with relativism.

My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.

My analysis, especially of the computer revolution, always comes back to capitalism. It's that economic system that has led to Western civilization's willingness to enslave ourselves to machines - because some people benefit enormously from it, while the costs are borne by other people and the planet.

My book had a universal theme. It's not a "racial" novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.

My only hope is that every other alien civilization isn't doing exactly what we are doing because then everybody would be listening, nobody would be receiving, and we would collectively conclude that there is no other intelligent life in the universe.

My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about.

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

My point is, as civilization is progressing, Mosaic law came down from the mountain, was handed to civilization, it emerged through the Greek civilization as the Greeks were developing their Age of Reason. And we're talking about the foundation of Western Civilization, and almost concurrently with that, Roman law was emerging as well.

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.

My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really crazy naive solution for the end of civilization.

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

New approaches are needed, new orientations in both thought and action. We must make the transition to a new civilization...We are talking of a transition toward a new civilization. No one knows what it will be like. What is important is to orient in that direction... I am convinced that a new civilization will inevitably take on certain features that are characteristic of, or inherent in, the socialist ideal.

Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.

Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.