Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.
Seriously, ‘Honey Boo Boo’ is the decay of Western civilization. Just because so many people watch the show doesn’t mean it’s good.
Washington and Lincoln mean as much to us as any two men could mean to a civilization, a people, and age, but I told Mr. Coolidge when he dedicated this monument that this rock is being carved with a monument that will outlive our government.
If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.
Americans’ great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.
In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.
Japan today has become acquainted with the Western civilization of the rule of Might, but retains the characteristics of the Oriental civilization of the rule of Right. Now the question remains whether Japan will be the hawk of the Western civilization of the rule of Might, or the tower of strength of the Orient.
Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.
I think if I were to express my wish, it would be that we are more regionally self-reliant. And I don’t mean people being survivalists, I mean regionally self-reliant. So that you have these individual cells. The idea of having different solutions in different areas, so that we have a very robust, durable civilization.
By bringing out into the public domain how human institutions actually behave, we can understand frankly, to a degree, for the first time the civilization that we actually have.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress. But all of them, or almost all of the wars, have been trade wars.
But if we keep doing politics the way we’re doing politics, and we keep doing climate action the way we’re doing climate action, we will not have a history that judges us because we, certainly as a civilization, won’t be here.
If you want to believe that the government’s coming for our guns or that being gay is a choice and a sin or that ObamaCare signals the end of civilization or that cutting taxes for rich people is the path to a better America, that’s your choice. I’m never going to believe in any of that.
The sovereign state has in our times become a lethal danger to human civilization because technical developments enable it to employ an infinite number and variety of means of destruction.
If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.
I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
You can’t have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can’t have junk food and have healthy people.
The Americans will never solve the Indian problem till the Indian is extinct. They have treated them after a fashion which has intensified their treachery and ‘devilry’ as enemies, and as friends reduces them to a degraded pauperism, devoid of the very first elements of civilization.
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
People here always said to me, ‘Why would you leave civilization to go to a place like Fiji?’ Fiji is a far more civilized place than California or New York City.
In our western civilization we have the glorious example, the great standard of perfection and the teachings of the Christ to guide us. He acts for us as Mediator between our personality and our Soul.
There’s no way that music could ever go down the tubes. I can’t imagine a civilization without music. When you realize today that music is such a part of people’s lives. And will always be, really.
A riot’s unchecked destruction of livelihoods and property is certainly newsworthy, threatening as it does the very possibility of civilization.
You think you’re in another civilization, another time, and then you see antennas coming out of these hovels, and your mouth falls open when you see the descendants of the Incas shouting ‘Columbo! Columbo!’
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
We strain to tell Americans and aliens in this country that there’s nothing unique about America, nothing unique about American civilization, nothing that requires their allegiance, nothing of great value that they should sacrifice for.
Gorillas are almost altruistic in nature. There’s very little if any ‘me-itis.’ When I get back to civilization, I’m always appalled by ‘me, me, me.’
I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good.
Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization.
There’s no question to my mind that saving our civilization and many other species is more important than our ability to do ground-based astronomy for a few decades.
The long march of Western civilization from pantheons of gods for every taste to one God for all has been thrown into reverse by celebrity worship to give us a plethora of ancient deities to follow.
I know about technology, about research, scientific applications, culture, civilization, differences between nations of the world, the nature of history.
People say ‘what do you mean’ when you talk about ‘bringing down civilization.’ What I really mean is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and depriving the powerful of the ability to destroy the planet. That’s what I really mean.
For all of higher civilization’s recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.
For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy – enforced through the rights of the firstborn son – has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions.
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
The government of Macau, of China, has been empirical and pragmatic and has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a feat unequaled in the history of civilization in any country.
Beneficience removes evils, introduces the practice of virtue, and adds to general welfare and civilization.
In order for the students’ development and the outer development of civilization to coincide, we need a faculty whose interest is not limited to specialized educational practices. Rather, this faculty must be fully involved in the broader aspects of life.
It is not necessary to argue to those for whom I write that the two great needs of mankind, that all men may be lifted up into the light of the highest Christian civilization, are, first, a pure, spiritual Christianity, and second, civil liberty.
America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.
It is possible to take the story of Noah figuratively, although virtually every Near East ancient civilization has its own version of the flood story (including the amoral epic of Gilgamesh).
It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.
Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that’s what sex is about; that’s what history is about.
Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as ‘Western Civilization,’ long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.
Since the dawn of time, traditional marriage – the union between one man and one woman – has been the building block of civilization, and at no point in our nation’s history has that foundation been under more severe attack than now.
CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally… Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.
I believe with all my heart that civilization has produced nothing finer than a man or woman who thinks and practices true tolerance.
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
