Civilization Quotes - Page 21

• Civilization tries to persuade us we are going towards something, a distant goal. We have forgotten that our only goal is to live, to live each and every day, and that if we live each and every day, our true goal is achieved.

  Jean Giono

  Inspirational, Live Life, Accomplishment

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• We were granted the right to exist by the God of our fathers at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization nearly 4,000 years ago. For that right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of the nations.

  Menachem Begin

  Father, Blood, Years

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• The world in the past has been ruled by force, and man has dominated over woman by reason of his more forceful and aggressive qualities both of body and mind. But the balance is already shifting—force is losing its weight and mental alertness, intuition, and the spiritual qualities of love and service, in which woman is strong, are gaining ascendancy. Hence the new age will be an age less masculine, and more permeated with the feminine ideals—or, to speak more exactly, will be an age in which the masculine and feminine elements of civilization will be more evenly balanced.

  Abdu'l-Bahá

  Spiritual, Strong, Past

  "The Power of the Feminine Self: Manhood Liberated from Violence Against Women" by Payam Akhavan, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2015.

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• Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.

  Sigmund Freud

  War, Growth, Against War

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey (1953). “The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud”

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• Technological civilization... rests fundamentally on power-driven machinery which transcends the physical limits of its human directors, multiplying indefinitely the capacity for the production of goods. Science in all its branches - physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology - is the servant and upholder of this system

  Charles A. Beard

  Psychology, Directors, Branches

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• An idea is only an idea if it causes unease, debate and reflection. By that standard, Thomas Homer-Dixon's concept of an 'ingenuity gap' is truly a new idea. I can think of no other new concept that so fully condenses all of the challenges we face as a human civilization than the 'ingenuity gap'. Homer-Dixon has found a way to unite all of our concerns about economics, war, population growth, complexity, etc. under a single heading. He is one of an elite group of academics who can write for a mass audience.

  Robert D. Kaplan

  War, Writing, Reflection

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• Experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a state depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men; for the nation is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal, improvement.

  Samuel Smiles

  Character, Men, Individual

  Samuel Smiles (1873). “Self-help; with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance”, p.18

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• The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.

  Ayn Rand

  Philosophy, Fighting, Confusion

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• Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.

  Ayn Rand

  Winning, Doe, Default

  Ayn Rand (1984). “Philosophy: Who Needs It”, p.73, Penguin

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• The press, watchful with more than the hundred eyes of Argus, strong with more than the hundred arms of Briareus, not only guards all the conquests of civilization, but leads the way to future triumphs.

  Charles Sumner

  Strong, Eye, Triumph

  Charles Sumner (2016). “The Complete Works of Charles Sumner”, p.593, Library of Alexandria

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• The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don't believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization.

  Terence McKenna

  Smart, Moving, Believe

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• Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  War, History, Principles

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.443, Harvard University Press

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• The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.

  Ernst Mayr

  Believe, Issues, Events

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• Civilization is paralysis.

  Paul Gauguin

  Art, Philosophy, History

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• Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?

  George Santayana

  Art, Philosophy, Thoughtful

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• Radicals, on the other hand, want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization. They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful. They feel that this minority control of production facilities is injurious to the large masses of people not only because of economic monopolies but because the political power inherent in this form of centralized economy does not augur for an ever expanding democratic way of life.

  Saul Alinsky

  Mean, Hands, Names

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• The origin of civilization is man's determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.

  H. C. Bailey

  Wisdom, Determination, Men

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• Do not confuse objectives with methods. When the nation becomes substantially united in favor of planning the broad objectives of civilization, then true leadership must unite thought behind definite methods.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Wisdom, Favors, Politics

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1941). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1937, Volume 6”, p.646, Best Books on

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• The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.

  Bertrand Russell

  Wise, Wisdom, Leisure

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “In Praise of Idleness”, p.10, Lulu Press, Inc

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• A civilization is only a way of life. A culture is the way of making that way of life beautiful. So culture is your office here in America, and as no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves, in quality, what you would have your buildings be?

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Beautiful, Wisdom, America

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• There are people accusing me that I'm sick, that I'm a danger to morals, western civilization and basically everything under the sun. And they've got these wild stories about me, completely off the wall, completely untrue. They thought them up and it makes you wonder what goes on in their brain, but of course, they don't consider themselves sick. They think they're normal because they don't dress like I do.

  Marilyn Manson

  Wall, Thinking, Accusing Me

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• The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem.

  Anna Julia Cooper

  Country, Unique, Race

  Anna Julia Cooper, Charles C. Lemert, Esme Bhan (1998). “The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters”, p.112, Rowman & Littlefield

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• [On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.

  Winifred Holtby

  Golf, Defects, Distressing

  Winifred Holtby (1933). “Mandoa, Mandoa!: A Comedy of Irrevelevance”

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• History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Struggle, Age, Different

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• The philosophy of love and peace strangely overlooked who was in possession of the guns. There had been love and peace for some time on the continent of Africa because for all this time black men had been captivated by the doctrines of Christianity. It took them centuries to realize its contradictions. ... perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ.

  Bessie Head

  Jesus, Lying, Philosophy

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