Civilization Quotes - Page 9

Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.

The only hope for developing a new civilization is to accept responsibility for improving our lives through knowledge, understanding, and a deeper comprehension of humanity’s relationship to natural processes of evolution. Our future is determined by effort we put forth to achieve this transition.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization.

At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.

A dialogue among civilizations can be seen as a dialogue between the individual and the universal.

We can either build a Star Trek future, in which our civilization rises to new heights, or descend into a Mad Max world. It is up to us.

So the Buddha is presenting awakening not as a single mystical experience that may come upon us at some meditation, some private moment of transcendence, but rather as a new engagement with life. He is offering us a relationship to the world that is more sensitized to suffering and the causes of suffering, and he gives rise to the possibility of another kind of culture, another kind of civilization.

Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.

The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play....We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.

One way in which all of us can help to combat the current wave of public indecency which threatens to undermine Western civilization is to concentrate upon and increase the solidarity of the family. This solidarity begins with a child at the mother's breast.

An important aspect of the Eurasian worldview is an absolute denial of Western civilization. In the opinion of the Eurasians, the West with its ideology of liberalism is an absolute evil.

What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?

The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.

The possibility of reduced-time interstellar travel either by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations at present or ourselves in the future, is not fundamentally constrained by physical principles.

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

The great enemy of any attempt to change men's habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by intertia.

Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history's great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time.

AIDS is a global problem and there should be a global solution found by the entire international community. It is really scary to see and imagine our world fall into pieces because we refuse to share and put in the common vestiges of our civilizations.

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.