Civilization Quotes - Page 63

The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.

So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.

If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.

It is my belief that we need a new transnational sustaining 'myth' that can impart value and respect. It is my further belief that we are coming to see our universe and life as creative, without a directing agency. Meaning emerges with life. If this view becomes widespread, it has the promise to become the sustaining myth we need to sustain in turn an emerging global civilization.

Promises controversy on a scale not seen since Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations sought to reframe a new world order.

Each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable.

My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really crazy naive solution for the end of civilization.

Cardinal Arithmetics is much older than Number Theory. People used to exchange things way before there were numbers. Expressing numbers like 762 is already a sign of a very advanced civilization.

America seemed a virgin land waiting for civilization. But Europe had made the wilderness it found; America was not a virgin, she was a widow.

Civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence - whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.

War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been more constant in history than war.

It was if the city knew about Percy's dream of Gaea. It knew that the earth goddess intended on razing all human civilization, and this city, which had stood for thousands if years, was saying back at her: You wanna dissolve this city, Dirt Face? Give it a shot. In other words, it was the Coach Hedge of mortal cities- only taller.

The science is in: either we go cold turkey on our coal, oil, and gas addictions, or we risk raising the planet's temperature to a level incompatible with the continued existence of civilization.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

It's the Law of God that gave the stability to Christian civilization.

There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.

Civilization is now under the tyranny of relativism.

That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.

Most of the scientists I know think civilization is teetering on the brink of a global disaster. They just don't know when it's going to hit. I don't have the answer to that either. I'm scared as hell.

When Western civilization invaded the Near and Far East and what is now called the Third World it imposed its own ideas of a proper environment and a rewarding life. Doing this, it disrupted the delicate patterns of adaptation and created problems that had not existed before.

The acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of Gentile civilization.

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.

But we must admit the possibility that continued investigation and experience will bring us ever nearer to that solemn moment, when the first man will rise from earth by means of wings, if only for a few seconds, and mark that historical moment which heralds the inauguration of a new era in our civilization.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.