I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about...

No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: It’s going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world.

I wouldn’t live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn’t want it next door. I’m not too happy it’s within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me....

Civilization is being poisoned by its own waste products

Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.

People usually feel funny, smile and laugh when I tell them about my strong belief in the very existence of prehistoric advanced technology and great civilizations of wilier races. I just can’t wait to see...

The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.

Destruction is easily reversed, Brain drainage howbeit is a civilization killer

In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and...

Why do they [Americans] quarrel, why do they hate Negroes, Indians, even Germans, why do they not have science and poetry commensurate with themselves, why are there so many frauds and so much nonsense? I...

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual’s right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper,...

To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the...

Is there a gun that shoots rain? Oh yeah, water guns. How technologically advanced we are!

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

The more civilized people are, the more honorable working hard is to them. As a result, the more civilized we get, the less we live.

Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy...

Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the...

The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets...

They believe civilization weakens natural selection. They do nature’s work so that we do not become a soft race.

Car la vie est structure, lignes de force et injustice. Que fais-tu s’il est des enfants qui s’ennuient, sinon de leur imposer tes contraintes, lesquelles sont règles d’un jeu, après quoi tu les vois courrir.(chapitre...

Further, any way of life based on the importation of resources is also functionally based on violence, because if your way of life requires the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable: if...

Se não aparecerem mulheres, importam-se, que é em Portugal para tudo o recurso natural. Aqui importa-se tudo. Leis, ideias, filosofias, teorias, assuntos, estéticas, ciências, estilos, indústrias, modas, maneiras, pilhérias, tudo nos vem em caixotes pelo...

Civilization on Earth planet was equated with selfishness and greed; those people who lived in a civilized state exploited those who did not. There were shortages of vital commodities on Earth planet, and the people...

Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene – colleges being nothing but grooming schools...

[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.

One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.

While it is generally agreed that the visible expressions and agencies are necessary instruments, civilization seems to depend far more fundamentally upon the moral and intellectual qualities of human beings — upon the spirit that...

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.

Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. – Pg. 195

Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of...

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

…that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too.

Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can...

It would have been called provincial and barbarous; it would have been cited as an incident of low civilization to confuse such art.

The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band...

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and...

Civilization: the human zoo

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

In the early twelfth century century the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation. She had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion. The great cathedrals of...

There’s no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

I can’t help remembering that good old wild Thoreau wound up a tame surveyor of Concord house lots. […] How would I know what it means? I don’t know what anything means. What it suggests...

Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak...

What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.

Science is a trigger of changes of civilization. Religion is the failsafe of science performance.