Thanks to arranged marriages: There are countless women who have never been their husband’s girlfriend.

What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between...

Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A...

Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all...

We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

I say that almost everywhere there is beauty enough to fill a person’s life if one would only be sensitive to it. but Henry says No: that broken beauty is only a torment, that one...

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are...

In God’s scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this...

Even if we’re among the lucky few who benefit from civilization, we find ourselves curiously unsatisfied, plagued by stress, worry, and conflict… Like the addict who believes against all evidence that what he can’t give...

What ‘primitive’ men called gossip, ‘civilized’ men call news.

The collective consciousness of mankind defines the existence and sustainability of this civilization.

Society destroys your individuality, your soul.

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!

One thus 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...

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and...

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of...

Politics bores you?” Bronsen said.Julien smiled. “It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven’t tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all politicians are liars,...

Scientists are the true driving force of civilization.

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames and...

The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach — see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience — is unworkable. Rather,...

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world,...

I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that man’s supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain’s capacity...

Fatally, the term ‘barbarian’ is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any...

He realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason

People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour,” said Ladyship coldly.He appeared to consider this. “Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible,” he said. “And who would you send to...

Il ne s’agit point de t’offusquer de ce que l’un diffère de l’autre, de ce que les aspirations de l’un s’opposent aux aspirations de l’autre, de ce que le langage de l’un ne soit point...

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

POUNDWe spend twelve hundred generations developing so-called civilization to the point where it produces an expert who can offer us salvation from our superstitions, and all we end up with is another superstition! If it...

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and...

We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering...

[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has...

Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?

What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three million times is civilization.

Winter arrived with December, and the world continued to suffer the loss of the Internet and most forms of communication. Supply chains were disrupted. The only mass form of personal communication was the letter, and...

Civilization is the commercialization of survival.

When we were on trees, others had lived in skies. When we reach skies, descendant of primitives will someday convey this message.

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

Our civilization will, of course, be “playing God” in an ultimate sense of the phrase: evolving a greater intelligence than currently exists on earth. It behooves us to be a considerate creator, wise to the...

From my childhood I had heard read, and read the Bible myself. Morning and evening the sacred volume was opened and prayers were said. The Bible was my first history, the Jews were the first...

Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora...

We could not be fulfilled if we weren’t inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage...

I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.

No hizo falta mucho para reducir el castillo de naipes de la civilización. Solo unas pocas ráfagas y pasó, la balanza se inclinó, se rompió el encanto. Los buenos ciudadanos se dieron cuenta de que...

Yes, it’s vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an...

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for...