Civilization Quotes
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The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.
William Barrett
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The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.
Clarence Day
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Hate-on-the-highway is an institution occupying a high place in our modern civilization....The godawful glares that drivers exchange as they pass each other, the mutual hatred between motorist and pedestrian, these manifestations seem to constitute the ultimate in righteous wrath.
H. Allen Smith
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No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
Niall Ferguson
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Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to another in order for stars to shine, planets to rotate, plants to grow, and civilizations to evolve.
Vaclav Smil
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The fundamental reality of any civilization must be its geographical cradle. Geography dictates its vegetational growth and lays down often impassable frontiers. Civilizations are regions, zones not merely as anthropologists understand them when they talk about the zone of the two-headed ax or the feathered arrow; they are areas which both confine man and undergo constant change through its efforts.
Fernand Braudel
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I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.
Flora Lewis
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... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
Freya Stark
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The only people who steal are thieves, and that’s a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will… return the benefit and reciprocate...
Michael Nesmith
The Monkees
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Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, 'What you are doing is none of my business' and 'What I am doing is none of your business.'
George Will
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Casper Wyo., population 18,000 when I was born, was large enough to hold the surprises of civilization, but small enough that the prairie was close by - for some in our town, right out the front door - stretching on forever, under the great curving sky.
Lynne Cheney
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A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.
Will Durant
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Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.
P. J. O'Rourke
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If you can see, hear, feel, and think, you should know that King Dollar rules the United States, and that the workers are robbed and exploited in this country to the heart's content of the masters.If you are not deaf, dumb, and blind, then you know that the American bourgeois democracy and capitalistic civilization are the worst enemies of labor and progress, and that instead of protecting them, you should help to fight to destroy them.
Alexander Berkman
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Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.
W. G. Sebald
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We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.
Sigmund Freud
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In North Africa they had the Arab with the gun and whip, but he could force people to do things ... and he accomplished a tremendous amount of extermination, but he certainly didn't advance that civilization very much.
L. Ron Hubbard
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The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions.
Sigmund Freud
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What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
Terence McKenna
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We must, then, apply the principle of Doubt to Civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.
Charles Fourier
