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

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky – under each bulb – down...

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or...

Civilization is a race between disaster and education.

Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes the milder form of rivalry which is...

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

PharaohsIt took Khufu twenty-three years to build his Great Pyramid at Giza, where some eleven hundred stone blocks, each weighing about two and a half tons, had to be quarried, moved, and set in place...

It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it’s people who are not willing to hurt other people because the other people are different.

It’s in the morning, for most of us. It’s that time, those few seconds when we’re coming out of sleep but we’re not really awake yet. For those few seconds we’re something more primitive than...

Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the...

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity...

Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged,...

Passion and courtesy are two polar opposite traits that serve to balance each other into a full-blooded whole.Without socialization, passion is a crude barbarian, and without passion, the elegant and polite are dead.Allow both passion...

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

The fundamental basis by which the court’s decision might be made is, in itself, imperfect and subject to contradictions. There is very little consideration given to a priori knowledge regarding the circumstances being presented and...

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make...

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the...

Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.

It’s funny how people think that they have “a right to life”. Now isn’t that the biggest load you ever heard? You don’t have a right to shit your pants on Sunday. Let’s take it...

In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the...

By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as ‘the outpost of Western Christian civilisation’: France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as...

Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone,...

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

Adoration is a sign of an infant civilization.

Throughout human history, countries rise and fall. But not America–we continue to rise and rise, like dough, until Jesus bakes us in the fiery Afterscape of the Rapture.

Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization.

The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has ‘civilized’ us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

Without wonder, there’s no progress. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. If you don’t exercise your capacity for wonder… well, use it or lose it. A civilization without wonder is a civilization that’s starting to...

No one is safe from nature’s savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.

To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life;...

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe’s urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of...

It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he’d made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise...

The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and...

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it’s something we can’t easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen?...

The civilizations barter in coldness; they peddles it, reinforces it, market it, entices with it, reward it, and then flees from it when it’s unchecked force is too much to marvel at. Soon absolute zero...

I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.

Back then: to be regarded as well-known, one had to be great. Today: to be regarded as great, one has to be well-known.

Why wasn’t I already kissing this woman? Why wasn’t I naked, eating violets, and playing music underneath the open sky?Looking around the room again, everything seemed terribly ridiculous. These people sitting on their benches wearing...

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

[O]ne person’s ‘barbarian’ is another person’s ‘just doing what everybody else is doing.

It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the...

Wherever we look, the work of the chemist has raised the level of our civilization and has increased the productive capacity of our nation.

Where two or more are gathered in the name of Man; that is civilization; that is Order; and that is the beginnings of brutality and suffering.

The disease of mutual distrust among nations is the bane of modern civilization

It seemed to me,’ said Wonko the Sane, ‘that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks,...

Since ideology, particularly in it’s shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of...

The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations – and absolutely nothing more.