1,222 Quotes About Civilization

Like it or not, we humans are bound up with our fellows, and with the other plants and animals all over the world.Our lives are intertwined.

If you are human, you are responsible - if you are not responsible, you are not human.

The true mark of English conversation is not being able to tell when you've been insulted. I think the more sophisticated society becomes, the more it hides behind the masks it manufactures.

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

Some people still look for proof of alien or prehuman civilization yet do not realize that they live daily within it.

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.

Protecting the weak is the whole fucking basis for civilization. If you're not protecting the weak, you're not civilized. You're fucking animals.

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.

Super-eruption of mount Toba, 76,000 years ago had wiped out a previous great civilization on earth.