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Quotations on Civilization 169 Quotes Found Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men. In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown. In our western civilization we have the glorious example, the great standard of perfection and the teachings of the Christ to guide us. He acts for us as Mediator between our personality and our Soul. The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards. The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force. Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces. Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization. Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses. In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office. Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply. Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet. We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex. It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history. There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time. In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained. By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile. Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us. We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences. Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members. Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition. Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years. The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good. The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion. I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it. To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization. America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval 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. To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher. Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether. Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. The American economic, political, and social organization has given to its citizens the benefits of material prosperity, political liberty, and a wholesome natural equality; and this achievement is a gain, not only to Americans, but to the world and to civilization. The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war. Artificial Intelligence leaves no doubt that it wants its audiences to enter a realm of pure fantasy when it identifies one of the last remaining islands of civilization as New Jersey. Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples. Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent. Since the dawn of time, traditional marriage - the union between one man and one woman - has been the building block of civilization, and at no point in our nation's history has that foundation been under more severe attack than now. A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization. I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good. I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science. It has been said that the position of woman is the test of civilization, and that of our women was secure. In them was vested our standard of morals and the purity of our blood. Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization. Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life. I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed. The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men. All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution. Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
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