Civilization Quotes - Page 34

• American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.

  Ishmael Reed

  Education, Sex, Race

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• By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Knowledge, Men, Primitive Man

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• Of all the works of civilization that interfere with the natural water distribution system, irrigation has been by far the most pervasive and powerful.

  Al Gore

  Powerful, Water, Natural

  Al Gore (2013). “Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose”, p.111, Routledge

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• If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.

  Johan Huizinga

  War, History, Foundation

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• Man's great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.

  Linus Pauling

  Men, Thinking, Evolution

  Linus Pauling, Barbara Marinacci (1995). “Linus Pauling in His Own Words: Selections From His Writings, Speeches and Interviews”, p.204, Simon and Schuster

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• In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal.

  Camille Paglia

  Law, Tyrants, Safety

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae”, p.128, Yale University Press

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• Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has - the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge - infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Knowledge, Mean, Poetry

  "The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser. Chapter One: "The Fear of Poetry", 1949.

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• The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

  Sigmund Freud

  Aggression, Inclination, Impediments

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• In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.

  Stefan Zweig

  Hate, Optimistic, Psychosis

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• Even in an advanced stage of civilization, there is always a tendency to prefer those parts of literature which favor ancient prejudices, rather than those which oppose them; and in cases where this tendency is very strong, the only effect of great learning will be to supply the materials which may corroborate old errors and confirm old superstitions. In our time such instances are not uncommon; and we frequently meet with men whose erudition ministers to their ignorance, and who, the more they read the less they know.

  Henry Thomas Buckle

  Strong, Ignorance, Men

  Henry Thomas Buckle (1913). “History of Civilization in England”

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• It is generally admitted that the cultural values (humanization) and the existing institutions and policies of society are rarely,if ever, in harmony. This opinion has found expression in the distinction between culture and civilization, according to which "culture" refers to some higher dimension of human autonomy and fulfillment, while "civilization" designates the realm of necessity, of socially necessary work and behavior, where man is not really himself and in his own element but is subject to heteronomy, to external conditions and needs.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Men, Expression, Needs

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• The logic of all this seems to be that it is all right for young people in a democracy to learn about any civilization or social theory that is not dangerous, but that they should remain entirely ignorant of any civilization or social theory that might be dangerous on the ground that what you don't know can't hurt you ... a complete denial of the democratic principle that the general diffusion of knowledge and learning through the community is essential to the preservation of free government.

  Carl L. Becker

  Education, Hurt, Government

  Carl L. Becker (1960). “Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life”

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• THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Science, Promise, Paradise

  Mark Kac, Gian-Carlo Rota, Jacob T. Schwartz (2009). “Discrete Thoughts: Essays on Mathematics, Science and Philosophy”, p.263, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise, and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.

  David Josiah Brewer

  Christian, Religious, Teaching

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• Ladies and gentlemen, if some of the leading artists in a civilization see a man urinating in another man's mouth and see composition and lighting and do not see their civilization being pissed upon, we are in trouble.

  Dennis Prager

  Christian, Religious, Artist

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• On New York subways in the 1980s: Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.

  Paul Goldberger

  New York, Cities, Subway

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• There are certain things for which civilization has no answer. But if you choose to meddle thus, then you must be prepared to facethe consequences, whatever they are.

  Jimmy Sangster

  Answers, Certain, Be Prepared

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• It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war--when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.

  Rebecca Latimer Felton

  War, Anger, Fall

  Rebecca Latimer Felton (1919). “Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth: Also Addresses Before Georgia Legislature Woman's Clubs, Women's Organizations and Other Noted Occasions”

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• I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

  Niall Ferguson

  America, Europe, Updates

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• Social intercourse -- a very limited thing in a half civilized country, becomes in our centers of civilization a great power. . .

  Emily Blackwell

  Country, Half, Social

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• If we are to preserve civilization, we must first remain civilized.

  Louis St. Laurent

  Firsts, Civilized, Preserves

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• If we cannot come together to pause, to respect our dead and the heroic lives of meaning they led, then ours is truly a civilization lost.

  Mark McKinnon

  Together, Heroic, Lost

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• But I just don't think it's an abyss of nothingness [after death] and that we fall off and that our journey stops. I think it's circular and we go and we go and we go. I know that there are civilizations that I think are way more sophisticated than we are and I think more sophisticated civilizations lived before us.

  Halle Berry

  Fall, Journey, Thinking

  "Tom Hanks, Halle Berry Interview, Cloud Atlas". MoviesOnline Interview, www.moviesonline.ca.

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• A happy people I call them still, whose peace and genuine morals have not been contaminated with European vices; and whose errorsare only the errors of ignorance, and not the rooted depravity of a pretended civilization, and a spurious and mock Christianity.

  John Gabriel Stedman

  Ignorance, Errors, People

  John Gabriel Stedman (1813). “Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America; from the Year 1772, to 1777:: Elucidating the History of that Country, and Describing Its Productions, ... with an Account of the Indians of Guiana, & Negroes of Guinea”, p.396

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• Madness in Civilization is a brilliant, provocative, and hugely entertaining history of the treatment and mistreatment of the mentally ill. Packed with bizarre details and disturbing facts, Andrew Scull's book offers fresh and compelling insights on the way medicine's inability to solve the mystery of madness has both haunted and shaped two thousand years of culture. Required reading for anyone who has ever gone to a shrink!

  Dirk Wittenborn

  Reading, Book, Medicine

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