Civilization Quotes
-
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
-
The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.
Victor Hugo
-
I think that any authentic feeling one has of life should be a feeling of defeat. It's a losing game. You're going to die. Civilization is going to end. Our society is in decline, and we should feel OK about it because Roman society was in decline and before it the Assyrian one was, and they disappeared off this earth and we will disappear too.
Etgar Keret
-
And after two days in civilization we realized we could never stay for long and started to plan our next adventure.
Bob Bitchin
-
Civilization means conforming to a standard of behavior that may not seem natural to us.
Andy Rooney
-
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
Thomas Sowell
-
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.
Bassam Tibi
-
Had been deeply struck.... by the damage wreaked upon mathematics in France by the first world war, when “a misguided notion of equality in the face of sacrifice” led to the slaughter of the country’s young scientific elite. In the light of this, he believed he had a duty, not just to himself but also to civilization, to devote his life to mathematics. Indeed, he argued, to let himself be diverted from the subject would be a sin. When others raised the objection “but if everybody were to behave like you...”, he replied that this possibility seemed to him so implausible that he did not feel obliged to take it into account.
Edward Frenkel
-
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
-
Modern civilization is a product of an energy binge. Binges often end in hangovers.
Alfred W. Crosby
-
The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.
Terence McKenna
-
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
-
In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.
Ian Mcewan
-
The legalized liquor business is the tragedy of our civilization. Alcohol is the greatest and most blighting curse of our modern civilization. The liquor seller is simply and only a privileged malefactor - a criminal.
Abraham Lincoln
-
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
-
But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.
Nikola Tesla
