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.

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...

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.

And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man...

By valuing its Christian roots, Europe will be able to give a secure direction to the choices of its citizens and peoples, it will strengthen their awareness of belonging to a common civilization and it...

Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself....

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts...

Civilization is in fact the longest story of all. Civilization can persist through a series of economies.

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.

Civilization is hideously fragile and there’s not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.

Com a mania francesa e burguesa de reduzir todas as regiões e todas as raças ao mesmo tipo de civilização, o mundo ia tornar-se numa monotonia abominável. Dentro em breve um touriste faria enormes sacrifícios,...

Good sex is the basis of any truly civilized society.

…the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines…

This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler: ‘I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river...

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or...

Our place is in European civilization.

while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.

A gold tooth is to some blacks, what braces are to all whites.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. … At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex...

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray...

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity,...