Civilization Quotes
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One of the joys our technological civilization has lost is the excitement with which seasonal flowers and fruits were welcomed; the first daffodil, strawberry or cherry are now things of the past, along with their precious moment of arrival. Even the tangerine -- now a satsuma or clementine -- appears de-pipped months before Christmas.
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Modern civilization has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise.
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There is a dichotomy between people who feel economic principles should order human civilization and people who believe humanitarian principles should order human civilization. That essential disagreement is underlying practically all our world drama.
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I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.
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Survival must come before civilization.
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I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science.
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When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.
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In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question.
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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.
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The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
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It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
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The enemies of American civilization-- for such are the enemies of slavery-- seem to be more on the alert than its friends.
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The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
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We can dream of an America, and a world, in which love and not money are civilization's bottom line.
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In Antarctica you get to know people so well that in comparison you do not seem to know the people in civilization at all.
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Taken over the centuries, scientific ideas have exerted a force on our civilization fully as great as the more tangible practical applications of scientific research.
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Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.
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The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day - these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they....who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.
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Further strengthenings of the self-centered instinct for survival recruit even greater numbers of people into some sort of ring of fellowship (church or gender, red state or blue) by populating the terra incognita outside the ring with enough barbarians to verify the existence of a civilization within--to define the preferred stock by what, as all good people agree, it decidedly is not.
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Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.
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Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head.
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Civilization is not a burden. It is an opportunity.
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The United States, knowing no distinction of her own citizens on account of religion or nationality, naturally believes in a civilization the world over which will secure the same universal laws.
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Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
