Civilization Quotes - Page 52

Champagne is the wine of civilization and the oil of government.

In the advance of civilization, it is new knowledge which paves the way, and the pavement is eternal.

The enemies of American civilization-- for such are the enemies of slavery-- seem to be more on the alert than its friends.

First, I worry about climate change. It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible.

I know this, and I know it from actual experience in the Orient, that the progress of modern Christian civilization has largely depended on the earnest hard work of the Christian missions of every denomination.

Architecture is, to a certain extent, a sensual gratification. It addresses itself to the eye, and affords the best scope for the parade of barbaric pomp and splendour. It is the form in which the revenues of a semi-civilized people are most likely to be lavished. The most gaudy and ostentatious specimens of it, and sometimes the most stupendous, have been reared by such hands. It is one of the first steps in the great march of civilization.

Unless we redesign our civilization in numerous ways, all of the science in the world won't save us.

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.

For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.

Specialization is the great evil of civilization.

All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

The great menace of civilization in the present is that we offer an education with too little regard for the roots.

A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.

Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.

Civilization is over-rated, but there isn't much else.

Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.

The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.