No matter where we are or how advanced we think we are, there are elemental issues of our civilization that stories help us work through.
One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals.
There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.
The line of least resistance in the progress of civilization is to make that theoretical postulate real by the continually increasing force of the world’s public opinion.
I grew up in Manhattan. For Manhattanites, Brooklyn was the sticks, a second-rate civilization. My friends and I, we were so snobby. Living in the Bronx or Brooklyn was incredible… for me, that was like a foreign country.
Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.
The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.
We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so.
While the West tries to turn its civilization into cultural variety hour, Islam tries to turn Muslim lands into a cultural monolith. The same West that justifies the rap culture thinks that every Muslim terrorist bombing is an expression of economic angst or social alienation.
It is a relatively small number of people who want to impose their will by the use of terror on the rest of civilization, who have got a program. It’s not blind violence. It’s with a purpose. They want to destroy the state of Israel. They want every westerner out of the Arab countries, Middle East and elsewhere.
If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force.
Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
Christianity is the very root and foundation of Western civilization.
Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting.
New York… when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.
The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.
As the grandson of Italian immigrants, maybe I am biased, but I think Christopher Columbus, the man who is rightfully credited with bringing European civilization to the Western Hemisphere, deserves the national holiday enacted by Congress in 1934.
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants’ civilization, you are part of the group; you don’t live for yourself alone.
The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering – that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man’s good.
Civil movements and riots are as old as human civilization. Long before Twitter was created, mobilization of the discontented was mouth-to-mouth, or even by ‘smoke signals’ to gather the uprising against established political power.
Patriotism is an indispensable weapon in the defense of civilization against barbarism.
No human civilization could ever sever our dependence on photosynthesis.
Martin Luther King said it was time to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of human civilization. I don’t think anyone is calling Martin Luther King a New Age woo-woo.
Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.
Standing, as I believe the United States stands for humanity and civilization, we should exercise every influence of our great country to put a stop to that war which is now raging in Cuba and give to that island once more peace, liberty, and independence.
Julian Assange is certainly no hero. The man behind WikiLeaks issued threats as if he were Dr. No bent on ending civilization as we know it. We will find him, lock him up, and throw away the key. But give the man credit; for a week the truth was laid bare.
Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization – is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it?
My songs are a mix of my own weird raised-by-wolves perspective and civilization.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.
In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.
I believe Costco does more for civilization than the Rockefeller Foundation. I think it’s a better place. You get a bunch of very intelligent people sitting around trying to do good, I immediately get kind of suspicious and squirm in my seat.
No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.
For years, I referred to climate change as an ‘existential’ threat to human civilization, and called it a ‘crisis.’
We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.
Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
Everywhere in the universe, the periodic table has the same basic structure. Even if an alien civilization’s table weren’t plotted out in the castle-with-turrets shape we humans favor, their spiral or pyramidal or whatever-shaped periodic table would naturally pause after 118 elements.
When the faith dies, the culture it produced begins to die, then the civilization goes, and, then, the population.
Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.
In 1861, Bachofen published his radical thesis that the Amazons were not a myth but a fact. In his view, humanity started out under the rule of womankind and only switched to patriarchy at the dawn of civilization.
To those acting against peace, civilization and the world order: We will oppose you.
Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.
Amid apocalyptic dystopia, ‘Fahrenheit 451”s protagonist retains sparks of curiosity, creativity, and courage, and these human characteristics are the seeds of hope that can arise, phoenix-like, from civilization’s ashes.
The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.
The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind.
Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.
Each man has an equal social right to multiply his power of motion by all the social factors of civilization. Private property in any of these factors is inconsistent with this fundamental right; it must, obviously, prove a source of economic despotism and industrial slavery.
Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.
If you look at any ancient civilization, they’ve all used fantasy stories to train the young.
It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.
I don’t want to compare my city to Zurich; thank God we’re not that boring. Rio is advancing fast, but we’re at a different phase in our civilization.
Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds – it’s the production of food and fiber from the world’s land and waters. Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy.
Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.
I think God’s going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.
Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.
Civilization in its present form hasn’t got long.
No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.
Feminists are in an untenable position, defending something they no longer believe in, and which history will force them to recognize was destructive of most of the central pillars of civilization. I’m just the first one to point it out publicly.
