Civilization Quotes - Page 38

There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.

In our civilization, there are permanent forms which are part of every epoch and every culture. They are not especially difficult to detect. A minimal knowledge of physics, astrophysics, and perhaps mathematics, brings to light certain patterns that make these subjects easier to understand. It is striking to see the extreme similarity between these scientific propositions and the forms that recur in all times, places and civilizations.

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.

Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.

Although humans have existed on this planet for perhaps 2 million years, the rapid climb to modern civilization within the last 200 years was possible due to the fact that the growth of scientific knowledge is exponential; that is, its rate of expansion is proportional to how much is already known. The more we know, the faster we can know more. For example, we have amassed more knowledge since World War II than all the knowledge amassed in our 2-million-year evolution on this planet. In fact, the amount of knowledge that our scientists gain doubles approximately every 10 to 20 years.

Beaumont specifically pointed out that the cultural elements and idioms regarded as "Egyptian" could not have originated in the land of the Nile. This single fact is inviolate and cannot be denied. It is obvious to those who have taken the time to study the subject, that the Egyptian civilization was transplanted by Western adepts and elders.

We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all-that the wealth of individuals and of state is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization.

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.

Since the main problem that American, the Afro- Americans have is a lack of cultural identity. It is necessary to teach [people] that they had some type of identity, culture, civilization before they were brought here.

I don't actually believe in a clash of civilizations. I believe in a clash of the civilized and the noncivilized.

The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released.. . . . At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food — Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend — the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. For a brief while the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.

The Imaginative Child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization

Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.

Everything in modern civilization is based on this concept of time which is not really valid.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

We all flow from one fountain- Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.

Fermentation equals civilization.

There is but little room for doubt that Egypt led the way in the creation of the earliest known group of civilizations which arose on both sides of the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia in the fourth millennium B.C.