Civilization Quotes
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The transmission of knowledge from generation to generation is one of the miracles of civilization.
Nicholas A. Basbanes
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Without fathers you would have no civilization.
Michael Gurian
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In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.
Margaret Mitchell
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In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.
Edward J. Fraughton
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The problem here is that a civilization that is 1,000 light years away doesn't know we exist. They don't know that we have radio telescopes here on Earth because they see Earth as it was 1,000 years ago. Nothing can travel faster than light, so however good their instruments they can't see in affect the future. So there is no particular reason they should be sending us messages at this time.
Paul Davies
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
Will Durant
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These strengths, and our civilization in general, have reached an apogee with the end of the apocalyptic threats of the Cold War and the end - or at least waning - of less successful, and ultimately less "just," political and economic systems. At the turn of the 21st century we appear to be entering our greatest century, a golden age. The challenge that we face is similar to that of the Classic Maya civilization: we have set in motion a "runaway train" of success.
Arthur Demarest
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The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.
Thomas Sowell
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Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death. Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves.
Saul Bellow
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Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.
Ray Bradbury
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As we enter the 21st Century it is clear that we have entered an unprecedented global age in which our diverse cultures, religions, philosophies, worldviews and perspectives encounter one another in the marketplace of our global village. It is now clear that our future sustainability on this planet calls for radical advances in our rational and human capacities to negotiate the powerful forces between worlds as the human family moves towards a sustainable global civilization.
Ashok Gangadean
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Is a civilization worth the name, which requires, for its existence the very doubtful prop of a racial legislation and a lynch law?
Mahatma Gandhi
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The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Sigmund Freud
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On the future of the U.S., or of Western civilization in general, I tend to be quite pessimistic. I would say that today I see most of the symptoms of societies on the brink of collapse, not just in the U.S., but in the tightly interconnected societies of Western civilization - now essentially world civilization.
Arthur Demarest
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For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.
Richard K. Morgan
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Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature. Lacking that, he also lost his foresight, and unwittingly depleted the inheritances of his children. “We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.
Edmund Morris
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If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.
Terence McKenna
