Civilization Quotes
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The room...is converted into a weapon, ... made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no door, no chair, no bed.
Elaine Scarry
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Civilization survives on the constant discovery of amity and an equal supply of damnation.
Victor Hugo
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With apologies to the green movement, "sustainability" is a myth. History and archaeology show that societies are always moving to the edge of crisis, "falling forward" through growth, but then responding often successfully to the problems created. What we can hope for is that with a somewhat more controlled level of growth, and with longer-term preparations for change, we can keep responding to the inevitable smaller crises, as they arise, and continue to postpone until later and later the, perhaps ultimately inevitable, end of our civilization.
Arthur Demarest
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Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.
Isaac Mayer Wise
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All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization.
Gerald Durrell
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Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.
John Maynard Keynes
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What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality - the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all of psychotherapy.
Brock Chisholm
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All that is good in civilization must be for the equal use of all, in order that each man may make his life most worthwhile to the common life and to himself.
George Davis Herron
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Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshiped by man.
Tom Rachman
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These European White Men, then, with civilization in their blood and in their destiny, crossed the Atlantic and set up a new civilization on a bleak and rock bound coast. It was the White Men who drove north to Alaska and west to California; the men who opened up the tropics and subdued the Arctics; the men who mastered the African Veldts; the men who peopled Australia and seized the gates of the world at Suez, Gibraltar and Panama.
Ben Klassen
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Our non-co-operation is with the system the English have established in India, with the material civilization and its attendant greed and exploitation of the weak.
Mahatma Gandhi
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The measure of civilization in a people is to be found in its just appreciation of the wrongfulness of war.
Philip James Bailey
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A civilization based on nonviolence must be different from that organized for violence.
Mahatma Gandhi
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You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Thomas Sowell
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“Put in the starkest terms, there is no measure by which we can adequately quantify the devastation a mass nuclear attack would have on our civilization. My”
William J. Perry
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Once dogmatism turns out the lights, you might as well close up shop as a civilization and pull up the covers as a sentient life form. You get nowhere with unquestioning certainty. It's thinking with your mind wide shut.
Bob Altemeyer
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A sincere person owes it to themselves to expose the frightful barbarity which still prevails in the hidden depths of a society so outwardly well-ordered. Take, for instance, our great cities, the leaders of civilization, especially the most populous, and, in many respects, the first of all — the immense London, which gathers to herself the riches of the world, whose every warehouse is worth a king’s ransom; where are to be found enough, and more than enough, of food and clothing for the needs of the teeming millions that throng her streets in greater numbers than the ants which swarm in the never-ending labyrinth of their subterranean galleries. And yet…beside these untold splendors, want is consuming the vitals of entire populations, and it is only sporadically that the fortunate for whom these hoards are amassed hear, as barely a muffled wailing, the bitter cry which rises eternally from those unseen depths.
Elisee Reclus
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The Open Society of Athens In democratic Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Greek civilization reached the apex of creativity. Perhaps alone among the Greek communities studied in this book, the classical Athenians demonstrated their ample endowment with every one of the ten characteristics that defined the ancient Greek mind-set. They were superb sailors, insatiably curious, and unusually suspicious of individuals with any kind of power. They were deeply competitive, masters of the spoken word, enjoyed laughing so much that they institutionalized comic theater, and were addicted to pleasurable pastimes. Yet the feature of the Athenian character that underlies every aspect of their collective achievement is undoubtedly their openness—to innovation, to adopting ideas from outside, and to self-expression.
Edith Hall
