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.

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for...

Life leads to consciousness

The life of the arts… is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.

If human beings were really progressive creatures, then all boys would be smarter, healthier, and, wealthier, than their grandfathers.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps...

The hardest time in this world is for the sensitive and intelligent people.

The history of our civilization, the great advances that made it possible, is not a story of cynics or doom criers. It is a gallant chronicle of the optimists, the determined people, men and women,...

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.

Columbia has this contemporary civilization program – western philosophy and political thought. The professor I keep in touch with recommended Anton Mesmer.

The earth is an orbiting speck in incomprehensible vastness. The histories of our civilizations, our accomplishments and secrets, great good and evil—these are no more significant than the single twinkle of a star. Perhaps, this...

Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed.

The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.

The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'” he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. “That’s it—foam, and fleeting. All man’s toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the...

If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,(…) I am tame. I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same...

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to...

Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere...

Your country is beautiful, a virtual paradise.” When will the people of Indonesia be as beautiful as their land, with a civilization and culture that contributes to the greater beauty of humankind and no longer...

Poets write beautiful words to describe savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.

The times do not call for grassroots political activism, as if the next election might be enough to reverse a massive cultural earthquake. They do not call for working just a little bit harder: a...

Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artist’s power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.

In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.

An inventor is a person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. ‘Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!’ we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should...

The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough...

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did...

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen...

[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven’t known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would...

Many lessons can be learned from the history of Western civilization, but one of them is especially clear. Lack of involvement in the affairs of one’s society can lead to a sense of powerlessness. In...

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily...

(When asked what he thought of Western civilization): ‘I think it would be a good idea.

Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.

What is word for good together living? Nobody shits in the well?”I laughed. “Civilization?”He nodded, splaying his fingers: amusement. “Yes,” he said. “Speaking with hands is civilization.””But smiling is natural,” I protested. “Everyone smiles.””Natural is...