111 Quotes About Civilisation

No matter how revolutionary people were, he said, they could not live without books. Without books, we would not understand the world; without books, we could not develop; without books, nature could not serve humanity.

The Norweigian philosopher Tonnesen said that to think about anything but death is evasion. Society, art, culture, the whole of civilisation is nothing but evasion, one great collective self delusion, the intention of which is to make us forget that all the time we are falling through the air, at every moment getting closer to death.

La prévoyance commence lorsque nous acceptons que nous sommes maintenant arrivés à créés une civilisation du risque.

Nothing is more important than a great idea that influenced thedevelopment of civilization.

The thumb may look like an ordinary finger, truly it is a miraculous gift from God! If all the fingers were long and straight, it would be impossible for us to hold or catch anything easily! If there was no thumb, then human civilisation would lag way behind!

Are we to conclude that these chief gods, Zeus and Yahweh, did not wish humankind to have moral consciousness and the arts of civilization? It is a mystery indeed.The most obvious explanation is that the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society—the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitative power. These are the “idols” of our society that are worshiped by multitudes of people.

The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

I believe profoundly in two rules. Justice and mercy – they seem to me the foundation of all civilized life and society, if you include under mercy, toleration.

The principle victims of British policies are Unpeople—those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the ‘savages’ of colonial days, who could be mown down by British guns in virtual secrecy, or else in circumstances where the perpetrators were hailed as the upholders of civilisation.