Civilization Quotes - Page 74

Who are we to say what's right for civilizations that were already thousands of years old when our own nation came into being?

The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.

Well, we definitely need a strong and clear and assertive America. That's for sure. But you've always got to build alliances. And so it's very important that we are able to build those alliances. And where we don't do what in a way to extremists want us to do, which is to make this into a battle between the West and Islam - it's not. This isn't a clash between civilizations. It's about whether the values of tolerance and respect for difference prevail.

Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire's did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV.

Virtually every advancement made by our species since civilization first peeked out of its nest of stone has been initiated by lone individuals, mavericks who more often than not were ignored, mocked, or viciously persecuted by society and its institutions.

But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

Anybody who knows something about the history of the human race knows that there is no civilization which has condoned homosexual marriage widely and openly that has long survived.

The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.

Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.

If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy . . . to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous . . . let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb

We live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and ... it's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations that we're seeing the current manifestations of.

What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?

I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible to civilization. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that the reformation must be worked.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

The inventor tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilization.

Every expansion of civilization makes for peace. In other words, every expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for law, order, and righteousness. ...It is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to the world.

The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of the higher faculties of men. Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization whence light and heat radiated out into the dark cold world.

For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.

The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.