Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.
Coal, oil and natural gas have lit homes and powered machinery for centuries, driving civilization forward. But as human development accelerated, the unsustainability of such energy became apparent.
Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply.
America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.
No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.
A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.
Iraq is no diversion. It is a place where civilization is taking a decisive stand against chaos and terror, we must not waver.
It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.
If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.
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.
If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.
Repression is the enemy of civilization – so keep dreaming, because the dreams we dream today will provide the love, the compassion, and the humanity that will narrate the stories of our lives tomorrow.
The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.
War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.
Tenderness has created the first ‘social order’ – that of the mother with her offspring. Through motherliness, woman later makes her great contributions to civilization.
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
That sacred space of conscience where you can exercise your rights in terms of religious freedom and deeply-held, reasonable beliefs is the core of human dignity. In fact, that’s the basis for civilization itself. And when you lose that fundamental principle… you have no basis on which to build.
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Though I do regard the Inquisition in general and the burning of Giordano Bruno in particular as blots on the history of the Roman Catholic Church, I am far from being actuated by hatred of that church, and in fact cannot imagine that European civilization would have developed or survived without it.
And when you redefine the family other than what the Creator intended when he established it, then you look at the devolution of civilization.
If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
How a society treats its disabled is the true measure of a civilization.
To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism.
Republicans will never turn a blind eye to unjust acts, but neither will we accept an all-out assault on Western civilization.
It’s quite possible that the end of us will not be the end of the Earth. Even if we really screw things up and things go badly for us and our civilization, the Earth is pretty resilient.
I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.
My body really, really wanted to reproduce when I was 15. It took a lot of civilization, socialization, willpower and some emulsion polymerization technology for me not to reproduce at 15.
Casper Wyo., population 18,000 when I was born, was large enough to hold the surprises of civilization, but small enough that the prairie was close by – for some in our town, right out the front door – stretching on forever, under the great curving sky.
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.
Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It’s happened many times in the past. It could happen to us.
Civilization can never be sustainable.
If we cannot come together to pause, to respect our dead and the heroic lives of meaning they led, then ours is truly a civilization lost.
There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite.
Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.
This is not the beginning of American civilization where we need guns because it’s the Wild, Wild West… There should not be guns in our society, and we all know that; politicians know that.
In peace, the Middle East, the ancient cradle of civilization, will become invigorated and transformed. Throughout its lands there will be freedom of movement of people, of ideas, of goods.
If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.
But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.
It’s a choice of civilization. I will be the president of those French who want to continue living in France as the French do.
When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved.
It seems to me we are now, since 1789, going through the same sort of process of regeneration the Roman world went through between 300 and 500. It is only to be hoped all civilization will not again be destroyed by the anarchists.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
It’s great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.
Civilization… wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
What most people don’t seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.
I’ve been waiting over 40 years to come to Cyprus, and it has not disappointed – the birthplace of Aphrodite, the Crossroads of Civilization, and, I might add, a genuine strategic partner to the United States of America.
The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we’ve been in an anthropocentric era.
I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it – not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.
Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.
For me, ‘Moby-Dick’ is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual – the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.
You ask what my conclusions are, rereading my journals and looking back on World War II from the vantage point of quarter century in time? We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense, it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before.
