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...

The fact that we are now crusaders needn’t blind us to the fact that for a very long time we have been, as Badger would say, echidnas. I can think of a hundred ways already...

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may...

All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another’s presence just as...

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.

It ain’t technology that enhances the civilization..but the way mankind perceives nature from all standpoints.

A child comes from God, a child is a gift from God, but a child is not our possession. Give the child unconditional love and freedom. Respect the child, the child has its own soul....

(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked.

Civilization has gotten further and further from the so-called ‘natural’ man, who uses all his faculties: perception, invention, improvisation.

LOCK-AND-KEY, n. The distinguishing device of civilization and enlightenment.

There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.

You’re mad, you missionaries,’ ejaculated Tai Haruru angrily. ‘What good do you think you do, crawling out to the extremities of all the different world’s ends and dying there like lizards spiked on sticks?’Brother Balaam...

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. “The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned...

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

The smile is civilization’s finest adornment. It signifies the willpower and duty to fashion mankind’s coexistence as quietly and agreeably as possible so that it will always appear friendly. For it is all a matter...

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of...

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization – a niche we filled because we got there...

We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them...

Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: ‘But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them,...

But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

Civilization is vastly overrated.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.