Quotes
Quotes about Civilization
The future of civilization depends on our overcoming the meaninglessness and hopelessness that characterizes the thoughts of men today. -Albert Schweitzer.
Labor is the fruit of civilization, not the basis of it.
Allen's Law of Civilization: It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
Be and not seem. A man is related to all nature. The less government we have the better. Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. To be great is to be misunderstood. Every man is in some way my superior. A man is a god in ruins. Life is a festival only to the wise. Knowledge is the only elegance. We boil at different degrees. Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it. We learn geology the morning after the earthquake. What is the hardest thing in the world? To think. Accept your genius and say what you think. Make yourself necessary to somebody. The only way to have a friend is to be one. Insist on yourself; never imitate. Music causes us to think eloquently. To live without duties is obscene. It is not length of life, but depth of life. The greatest homage to truth is to use it. The only reward of virtue is virtue. Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path. We become what we think about all day long. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. There is no knowledge that is not power. Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Heroism feels and never reasons and is therefore always right. A good indignation brings out all one's powers. A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect. Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can. Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. The only sin we never forgive each other is difference of opinion. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Judge of your natural character by what you do in dreams. What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. The only sin we never forgive each other is difference of opinion. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others. A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are. The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Our faith comes in moments, yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is merely through a transfer of idolatry. What lies beyond us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age. Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?. The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of somebody's enthusiasm. It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances. If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds. There is no beautifier of complexion or form of behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us. This gives force to the strong - that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action. -U.S. Poet.
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
There is a higher form of patriotism than nationalism, and that higher form is not limited by the boundaries of one's country; but by a duty to mankind to safeguard the trust of civilization.
Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.
Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.
The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves.
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
If the small minority of enlightened citizens who are able to conceive sound principles of political management do not succeed in winning the support of their fellow citizens and converting them to the endorsement of policies that bring and preserve prosperity, the cause of mankind and civilization is hopeless. There is no other means to safeguard a propitious development of human affairs than to make the masses of inferior people adopt the ideas of the elite. This has to be achieved by convincing them. It cannot be accomplished by a despotic regime that instead of enlightening the masses beats them into submission. In the long run the ideas of the majority, however detrimental they may be, will carry on. The future of mankind depends on the ability of the elite to influence public opinion in the right direction.
The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.
I think there are only three things America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.
It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.
Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
...it is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.
Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.
Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
The pursuit of the good and evil are now linked in astronomy as in almost all science. . . . The fate of human civilization will depend on whether the rockets of the future carry the astronomer's telescope or a hydrogen bomb.
