Civilization Quotes - Page 70

The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.

Politics is the art of making civilization work.

The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.

Despite all the progress of civilization, women have remained exactly as they emerged from the hand of Nature.

The final goal of world revolution is not socialism, or even communism, it is not a change in the present economic system, it is not the destruction of civilization in a material sense. The revolution desired by the leaders is moral and spiritual, it is an anarchy of ideas in which all the bases established nineteen centuries ago shall be overthrown, all the honored traditions trodden under foot, and, above all, the Christian ideal finally obliterated.

As women go, so goes civilization.

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work.

To defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilization, you need education...

Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

Without the institution of slavery, civilization would never have been achieved, for no one could ever have done anything intellectual if he had to spend all his time hewing and digging and fighting.

Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.

It oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise.

Lies hold civilization together. If people ever seriously begin telling each other what they really think, there'd be no peace. Good-bye to tact. Good-bye to being polite. Good-bye to showing tolerance for other people's buffooneries. The fact that we claim to admire Truth is probably the biggest lie of all. But that's part of the charade, part of what makes us human, and we do not even think about it. In effect, we lie to ourselves. Lies are only despicable when they betray a trust.

Each time you admire the façade of the New York Public Library, you are paying homage to Western civilization.

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

We must appraise civilization in relation to its territory and in relation to its duration. The character of the medium of communication tends to create a bias in civilization favourable to an over-emphasis on the time concept or on the space concept and only at rare intervals are the biases offset by the influence of another medium and stability achieved.

The significance of a basic medium to its civilization is difficult to appraise since the means of appraisal are influenced by the media, and indeed the fact of appraisal appears to be peculiar to certain types of media. A change in the type of medium implies a change in the type of appraisal and hence makes it difficult for one civilization to understand another.

If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.

I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.

While denial leads to certainty, it is only the certainty of death. This is true for individuals and also for civilizations.