Civilization Quotes - Page 2

The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you

My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

...a woman smart and persistent enough that even a PhD in psychology hasn't clouded her insight into how people think and act.

If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man's worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and lead Western humanity to its present state of decline.

Empathy is a big part of Sparkleponies, because it’s also my belief (as a history and political science major) that societies that don’t practice rational empathy inevitably collapse – either by fomenting conflict from within by oppressing a segment/s of their populace, or seeking conflict from without by taking from others and eventually getting into a fight they can’t win.

If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?

Good sex is the basis of any truly civilized society.

We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.

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.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....

It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.

Green meant water, green patches meant farmers and farmers meant agriculture. Agriculture meant food to eat and food to sell, which meant towns and transport. They had reached civilization.

O what we ben! And what we come to!

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.

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.

Thinking the simplest rights of Civilization to The Humanitarian !

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.

Barbarians are all alike... sit up half the night to discuss anything a Roman says.

Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.

We only refer to sapient creatures as civilized when their society is willingly self-correcting. That means that any problem or imbalance that arises is fixed, and I mean really fixed - not ignored, not hidden, and not passed off to a future generation.

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

‎I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.

What is the point of being humans, if our actions scream with more bestiality than humanity!

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.

What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will.

One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog shit hotdogs, dog shit ice cream, General Tso's dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn't taste good. Or if you cling too tightly to these stories (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make this example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. Or, for that matter, substitute Big Mac, Whopper, or Coca Cola.

Cultures that do not wish to exist cannot be dissuaded from destroying themselves.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Back then: to be regarded as well-known, one had to be great. Today: to be regarded as great, one has to be well-known.

The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle.

Poets write beautiful words to describe savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.

There is such a thing as too much couth.

I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.

The more we humanize the society, the more we will become humans.

The hardest time in this world is for the sensitive and intelligent people.

Passion and courtesy are two polar opposite traits that serve to balance each other into a full-blooded whole.Without socialization, passion is a crude barbarian, and without passion, the elegant and polite are dead.Allow both passion and courtesy into your life in equal measure, and be complete.

The weakest ones are the wickedest cruel When the strongest ones in gentleness rule!

A call to embrace democracy is the worst insult to a society that is still alien to civilisation. It is like being asked to dance to the tune of mob justice.

This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

A tablecloth restaurant is still one of the great rewards of civilization.

It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.

I don't know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it's not so important. Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.

Civilization is a movement - not a condition a voyage - not a harbour.

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.

Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism. ("A Woman's Vengeance")

When we were on trees, others had lived in skies. When we reach skies, descendant of primitives will someday convey this message.

Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems to be their nature.- Yes; it's a funny habit.- No, it's not funny; you are wrong there. There's nothing funny in nature, however funny it may seem to man. If dogs could reason and criticize us they'd be sure to find just as much that would be funny to them, if not far more, in the social relations of men, their masters -far more, I think. I am more convinced that there is far more foolishness among us.

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?

You are wrong,” says the man. His voice is low and resonant. The metal walls of the dome, all the knives and swords and spears, all seem to vibrate with each of his words. “Your rulers and their propaganda have sold you this watered-down conceit of war, of a warrior yoked to the whims of civilization. Yet for all their self-professed civility, your rulers will gladly spend a soldier’s life to better aid their posturing, to keep the cost of a crude good low. They will send the children of others off to die and only think upon it later to grandly and loudly memorialize them, lauding their great sacrifice. Civilization is but the adoption of this cowardly method of murder.

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

What 'primitive' men called gossip, 'civilized' men call news.