Best 2527 quotes in «civilization quotes» category

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

There is often no material difference between the enjoyment of the highest ranks and those of the rudest stages of society. If the life of many a young English nobleman, and an Iroquois in the forest, or an Arab in the desert are compared, it will be found that their real sources of happiness are nearly the same.

There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a yeti.

There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it's because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it's still better than skipping through a meadow.

There is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting.

There is such a thing as too much couth.

The religion that has transformed Western civilization for two millennia is a blank slate for liberals. Their closest reference point is conservative Christians, meaning people you're not supposed to hire. And these are the people who carp about George Bush's alleged lack of intellectual curiosity.

There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!

There may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe.

There never was a good knife made of bad steel.

There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.

There's a fundamental difference between people who want to see the Internet and say - 'Let's lobotomize and censor parts of it because we need to control it' -  and those like us who see the Internet as a method of growing the economy and innovating in front of the world. And we have to actually reconcile those two positions. And we believe that it is much better to protect this crown jewel of civilization, which is the ability for us to communicate and express our ideas freely, than to try to lobotomize it.

There's never been a civilization, ever in history, that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity and traditional marriage, traditional child rearing, and has survived.

There's never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived.

There's just no - nothing like this country, which is the only, really, multiracial country that's tried to share in a common culture in the history of civilization that's pulled it off. A lot of the times, we want perfection. If we're not perfect, we're not good.

The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.

There's people who actually have a whole science devoted to what makes a sticky meme and that idea of that question of why some ideas about how civilizations work catch on and others don't.

There's something about the style of living in the country that they feel, "This is what represents me." So style is about the philosophy of how we create our civilization.

The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.

The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty.

There was something horrifying in the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call 'civilization,' we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call 'nations' and armed to apprehend or kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

There were many stages to the Atlantean civilization. During the later stages, scientists became involved with advanced particle physics. In particular they were interested in reverse gravity fields.

There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.

There were incredibly complex societies already existing in North America long before Europeans arrived. So many people think that before European contact it was just Natives huddling around a fire, waiting for civilization to come save them. But that was not the case.

There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced.

The right to a quality education is, I believe, the perfect path to bridge the gap between different cultures and to reconcile various civilizations. Without such a right, the values of liberty, justice and equality will have no meaning. Ignorance is by far the biggest danger and threat to humankind.

The richest person in the world - in fact. All the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library. You can measure the awareness, the breadth and the wisdom of a civilization, a nation, a people by the priority given to preserving these repositories of all that we are, all that we were, or will be.

The right tools for solving disputes within our community are precision instruments such as reason, communication, empathy, curiosity, and understanding. They are also the right tools for building a global civilization of peace and prosperity.

The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization, as hitherto understood; but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the state. It bears those, indeed, which can be most easily borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine.

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

The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.

The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

The saying of John Peale Bishop is worth recalling, that the South excelled in two things which the French deem essential to civilization: a code of manners and a native cuisine. Both are apt to suffer when life is regarded as a means to something else. Efficiency and charm are mortal enemies, and Southern charm indubitably derives from a carelessness about the efficient aspects of life.

The science is in: either we go cold turkey on our coal, oil, and gas addictions, or we risk raising the planet's temperature to a level incompatible with the continued existence of civilization.

The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization.

The Seascapes are before human beings and after human beings. The Seascapes were there before our presence, and when our civilization is over, seascapes will still exist. Our presence is temporary. Civilization is only 5,000 to 6,000 years. The history of ours, the material history of consciousness, is rather short.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth - Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.

The significance of a basic medium to its civilization is difficult to appraise since the means of appraisal are influenced by the media, and indeed the fact of appraisal appears to be peculiar to certain types of media. A change in the type of medium implies a change in the type of appraisal and hence makes it difficult for one civilization to understand another.

The sign, which says: "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door!" - Of course, I've read it. Why do you think I want it opened?.. To see why they wanted it shut, of course. This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.

The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.

The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play....We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.