CIVILIZATION QUOTES

quotations about civilization

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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.

ORSON WELLES

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It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.

SIGMUND FREUD

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We have forgotten that we live in the universe, and that our civilization itself is merely an elaboration of the palm-leaf hat that one of our ancestors tried on ten thousand years ago to ward off the sun, a more complicated and ample version that now not only wards off the sun but shuts out the view. We have lost ourselves within it.

WENDELL BERRY

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Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

H.L. MENCKEN

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Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

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The destruction that barbarians leave behind has a grim fascination, doesn't it? We're reminded how thin is the veneer of civilization.

DEAN KOONTZ

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Civilization is like a river. Walking along its banks we are drawn compulsively to the river's sparkling, ever-changing surface, with its noisy progressions, its sudden directional changes, its unexpected reversals, and its slow descent into the wild chaos of the great ocean. To begin again anew. Watching it from a safe distance we are fascinated by the abundance of life swarming in and around this vibrant surface. Its brilliant ephemeral display distracts us from the river's hidden depths. We are beguiled into believing that some superficial principle of movement is at work. Only those who wade into its depths discover that powerful, hidden undercurrents, rarely betraying their silent presence, are responsible for the constantly changing surface patterns. The ephemeral surface display has deep eternal origins. Those who wish to negotiate those waters ignore its silent forces at their peril.

GRAEME SNOOKS

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Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry ... The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.

WILL DURANT

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Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

CHARLES DARWIN

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You can't say civilization don't advance ... in every war they kill you in a new way.

WILL ROGERS

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Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

ROBERT E. HOWARD

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All of our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, is comparable to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

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Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

AYN RAND

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The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

GAO XINGJIAN

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We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

ANTHONY MARRA

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Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.

ROBERT E. HOWARD

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An example particularly well-fitting to represent the current status of civilization is the one of the frog in the pot. If we put a live frog into a pot full of boiling water, the frog will suddenly jump outside, saving its life. But if we put the frog into a pot full of cold water, and we light the fire under the pot, the frog will stay inside, and will slowly die. Our civilization is like that frog, and the pot we are in is getting more and more dangerous.

ADRIANO AUTINO

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

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You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

WENDELL BERRY

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Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

EDWARD ABBEY

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