Best 2527 quotes in «civilization quotes» category

It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it's people who are not willing to hurt other people because the other people are different.

It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves.

It's probably not easy for a woman to understand what it's like to be a man. Imagine you're starving, and someone puts a huge buffet in front of you. There's delicious, mouth-watering food all around you, and it's really really hard not to eat it all. That's what it's like to be a man around attractive women. The urge to want to hump everything that moves is part of a man's natural programming. It's a deep-seated hunger. To suppress that hunger takes civilization and a lot of willpower.

It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he'd made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and the tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half-crazed and wallowing in the carrion. I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not hauling a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there were eight million carcasses for that's how many hides reached the railhead. Two years ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they'd never been at all. The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.

It was not exasperation.... It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.

It was nine o'clock, cloudy, and a little like one of those science fiction movies where a few survivors are clinging to the wreckage, living out their days in the dry husk of civilization.

It was not until 2014, more than two decades after the mastodon's discovery [a mastodon scavenged by humans in the Americas], that the tide decisively turned. Built on improved understanding of processes that incorporate natural uranium and its decay products in fossil bone, a newly enhanced technique, known as 230 Th/U radiometric dating, was now available that could settle the age of the Cerutti deposit once and for all. Deméré therefore sent several of the mastodon bones to the US Geological Survey in Colorado, where geologist Jim Paces, using the updated and refined technique, established beyond reasonable doubt that the bones were buried 130,000 years ago.

it wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it .... what man calls civilization always results in deserts .... men talk of money and industry of hard times and recoveries of finance and economics but the ants wait and the scorpions wait for while men talk they are making deserts all the time getting the world ready for the conquering ant drought and erosion and desert because men cannot learn .... it wont be long now it wont be long till earth is barren as the moon and sapless as a mumbled bone

I've often heard people say, “Your country is beautiful, a virtual paradise.” When will the people of Indonesia be as beautiful as their land, with a civilization and culture that contributes to the greater beauty of humankind and no longer smothers and strangles the mind?

Living in a world where people measure their happiness by self-indulgence and decadence, Is like watching a whole society being pushed into the abyss of perpetual decay and aberrations.

I wonder,' Trull said as he watched the momentary stand-off, 'if this is how domestication first began. Not banding together in a hunt for prey, but in an elimination of rival predators.

Just like you silly bums, I have a personal sky god. I bow to him, as you do to your airy-fairy sod. He prefers I call him Mr. NOT.

Many lessons can be learned from the history of Western civilization, but one of them is especially clear. Lack of involvement in the affairs of one's society can lead to a sense of powerlessness. In an age that is often crisis-laden and chaotic, an understanding of our Western heritage and its lessons can be instrumental in helping us create new models for the future. For we are all creators of history, and the future of Western and indeed world civilization depends on us.

Look at their arts, their power of turning stone into lifelike figures, and above all, the way in which they can transfer their thoughts to white leaves, so that others, many many years hence, can read them and know all that was passing, and what men thought and did in the long bygone. Truly it is marvelous.

Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or more were effaced, and there he was, the alert and predatory sub-human, further from what she believed man should be like than the naked savage, because the savage was tractable, while this creature, wearing the armor of his own rigid barbaric culture, consciously defied progress. And that was what Stenham saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness, and excited his praise precisely because he was “pure”: there was no room in his personality for anything that mankind had not already fully developed long ago. To him he was a consolation, a living proof that today’s triumph was not yet total; he personified Stenham’s infantile hope that time might still be halted and man sent back to his origins.

Los británicos, al igual que los estadounidenses, recuerdan la Segunda Guerra Mundial como una época en la que su mejor generación salvó al mundo de la maldad del nazismo.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

[L]uxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience. (Ancillary Justice)

... man by nature is not a wild or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not, by vicious habit; and that again on the other side, he is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as beasts themselves that are wild by nature, become tame and tractable by housing and gentler usage...

Music and symbols, they're older than human race. Prehuman beings used them to teach early mankind.

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.

My argument has long been that the Edfu Building Texts reflect real events surrounding a real cataclysm that unfolded between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, a period known to paleoclimatologists as the Younger Dryas and that the Texts call the 'Early Primeval Age.' I have proposed that the seeds of what was eventually to become dynastic Egypt were planted in the Nile Valley in that remote epoch more than 12,000 years ago by the survivors of a lost civilization and that it was at this time that structures such as the Great Sphinx and its associated megalithic temples and the subterrranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid were created. I have further proposed that something resembling a religious cult or monastery, recruiting new initiates down the generations, deploying the memes of geometry and astronomy, disseminating an 'as-above-so-below' system of thought, and teaching that eternal annihilation awaited those who did not serve and honor the system, would have been the most likely vehicle to carry the ideas of the original founders across the millennia until they could be brought to full flower in the Pyramid Age.

My broad conclusion is that an advanced global seafaring civilization existed during the Ice Age, that it mapped the earth as it looked then with stunning accuracy, and that it had solved the problem of longitude, which our own civilization failed to do until the invention of Harrison's marine chronometer in the late eighteenth century. As masters of celestial navigation, as explorers, as geographers, and as cartographers, therefore, this lost civilization of 12,800 years ago was not outstripped by Western science until less than 300 years ago at the peak of the Age of Discovery.

Meekness-induced prejudices have no place in the society of thinking humanity.

Men have always wanted to have sex with as many fertile young women as possible. It's part of a man's basic programming. That hasn't changed. Civilization is nothing more than an artificial and very thin veneer hiding our deep-seated primitive urges.

Modern civilization depends on science … James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment … narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life … science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity. [Joseph Henry was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, named after its benefactor, James Smithson.]

Morals are nothing but a civilized society’s attempt to tame some beast called man.

Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

Nations rise and fall, flourish and decay, by what they believe in and by what their culture stands for.

No civilization can thrive or survive if it refuses to adapt or change.

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new.

Of course I realized that the Protestants denominations of the world have grown and matured over the years, but maybe we should not throw away the gains of the old Protestants that brought us to our modern day civilization.

Nothing holds back human progress as frequently as the misbelief that the words ‘impossible’ and ‘improbable’ are synonyms.

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces. You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew. I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it.

Nothing distresses the civilized person like unfettered nature. The Grand Canyon seen from behind the railing is indeed a splendid sight, but as soon as the desert reclaims your golf course that is another matter altogether.

Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune.

Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern he world in the was of peace, decency and mutual respect. I do not believe God ever intended it to be that way. He wants us to reach out and learn from the wisdom he has given to humanity over broad sweeps of time and place and personality.

Old Age homes are civilization's dumpsites for human beings who it cannot exploit further.

O Kate, nice customs curtsy to great kings. Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confin'd within the weak list of a country's fashion; we are the makers of manners, Kate; and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults.

Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.

Our Freedoms come from those that keep our beliefs, our ideology, and lifestyle safe. You may never know who they are but salute their presence. Their only glory is knowing we recognize their efforts even if they are but ghosts.

One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.

On why 300 years separates the first use of glass lenses in spectacles and their use in a telescope: “In many cases there are times when an invention is technologically possible – and in which it may indeed appear necessary, as the telescope may have – but without a market the idea will not sell, and in the absence of the technical and social infrastructure to support it, the invention will not survive.

Only by the aid of language does reason bring about its most important achievements, namely the harmonious and consistent action of several individuals, the planned cooperation of many thousands, civilization, the State; and then, science, the storing up of previous experience, the summarizing into one concept of what is common, the communication of truth, the spreading of error, thoughts and poems, dogmas and superstitions. The animal learns to know death only when he dies, but man consciously draws every hour nearer his death; and at times this makes life a precarious business, even to the man who has not already recognized this character of constant annihilation in the whole of life itself.

Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.

Our current ever-devouring reality, sustained and perpetuated by our long-standing beliefs of power and profit before all life on earth, is arrogant and unyielding insanity. Here’s why: A reality of unbridled greed and exploitive competition pushes all of humanity to the threshold of insanity by demanding the lowest expression of our human nature in order to simply survive. In short, it dehumanizes us daily. The ones doing the dehumanizing and the ones who are dehumanized - both exist in a less than humane state of consciousness. A dehumanized reality. Which explains why so very often a socially concerned corporate manager, who puts human interests ahead of profit maximization is not praised but quickly joins the ranks of the unemployed. Our being dehumanized daily also explains the blind opportunistic greed of gentrification, our money obsessed life repudiating healthcare system, our continually growing poverty class – ad nauseum. In essence, all of the cruel ways with which we think about and treat one another (and the earth) is encouraged, enforced and repeatedly engendered as the only available dominate reality. Mistakenly, this is believed to be our fundamental human nature or as pseudoscience explains it “survival of the fittest” and as religion teaches “we are all born sinful.” Which in turn engenders, in every generation, the belief that it is virtually impossible for humans to be more humanized, more civilized. The propagated belief that humans are hopelessly hard-wired; created to be nothing more than sinful, wicked little hairless monkeys continues century after century; and so we have remained for the last eleven thousand years a pseudo civilization. “Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.” Albert Einstein Our entire social stratification of wealth, income, race, social competition, education, and power - from birth to death - is constantly reiterated into our conscious and unconscious minds as Normal. Civilized. The Dominant Reality. For instance, our antagonistic competition for life is plainly evident when opposing groups or cultural realities come into contact or collide with the realities of other individuals, other groups, societies, and cultures. All of which are equally real realities to each other - even the illusionary realities – even the oppressive ones - but our existing in a dehumanized state more often than not separates us from one simple humane quality and ultimate realization: The lives of other human beings.

Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt.