Quotes on Civilization
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
-- Albert EinsteinOne... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.
-- Sigmund FreudPeople don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.
-- Edmond de GoncourtPeople sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.
-- Kenneth ClarkProgress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.
-- Thor HeyerdahlSavage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.
-- Carl von ClausewitzSocial science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.
-- Fernand BraudelSociety attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
-- B.F. SkinnerSociety is a made-up formula of what we are supposed to be, kept alive by those who believe in it.... I laugh in the ugly face of society, with all its fabricated dimensions.
-- Christina GerogiannisThe dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.
-- Carol MatthauWe should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
-- Henry David ThoreauWe've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
-- Carl SaganWhat we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
-- Henry Havelock EllisWhen discussing the rise and fall of empires, it is well to mark closely their rate of growth, avoiding the temptation to telescope time and discover too early signs of greatness in a state which we know will one day be great, or to predict too early the collapse of an empire which we know will one day cease to be. The life-span of empires cannot be plotted by events, only by careful diagnosis and ausculation--and as in medicine there is always room for error.
-- Fernand BraudelWhen you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.
-- Lois McMaster BujoldWhile rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.
-- Thomas SowellWho ordained that the few should have the land (of Britain) as a prerequisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?
-- David Lloyd GeorgeWithin seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000.
-- F. J. Lucas