Civilization Quotes - Page 44

Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.

This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other

A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.

Without security, civilization is cramped and dwarfed. Without security, there can be no freedom. Nor shall I say too much, when I declare that security, guarded of course by its offspring, freedom, is the true end and aim of government.

I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.

In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal.

What I question is the extent to which any of us truly knows what the facts really are. I mistrust every ideal cherished in western democratic civilization. The words that make others smile and nod in agreement cause me to recoil.

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

On Painting Rats, and the Glorification of Them. They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant, and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.

Civilization never stands still; if in one country it is falling back, in another it is changing, evolving, becoming more complicated, bringing fresh experience to body and mind, breeding new desires, and exploiting Nature's cupboard for their satisfaction.

Civilization, we shall find, like Universalism and Christianity, is anti evolutionary in its effects; it works against the laws and conditions which regulated the earlier stages of man's ascent.

To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.

Christ did not come to civilize. He came to save. Civilization is not the solution; it does not destroy the works of the devil. All civilization aims at world improvement, at the gradual elimination of the curse; it is a process of evolution. It is like a man who is suffering from a terrible disease, and the physician who comes to help him gives him a salve to apply. He treats the skin symptoms but the source of the disease he never considers and never touches. Such is a boasted and progressive civilization. It is a delusion.

Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

I can hardly believe what these 12 caricatures [about Prophet Muhammad] have caused in the world. We Danes feel like we have been placed in a scene in the wrong movie. But I don't see the fight as a clash of civilizations. Rather, we must focus on avoiding exactly this type of conflict. We have to return to dialogue, to mutual understanding and to an acknowledgement of freedom of opinion.

In the name of a greater civilization, we curse those who for the sake of their ambitious dreams, brought about the massacre of so many young lives. No matter how brutal the crime, you will always get glorification of its heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture.

Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse. The differences in the product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the worlds cultures reflects a corresponding diversity. In the wilds that gave them birth.

Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilization in high boots

I am among those who believe that our Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has many commendable qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian ethic, but it lacks the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence. Future historians will record that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.