1,222 Quotes About Civilization

In any effort to understand what lies ahead, as much as what lies behind, the role of infectious disease cannot properly be left out of consideration. Ingenuity, knowledge, and organization alter but cannot cancel humanity's vulnerability to invasion by parasitic forms of life. Infectious disease which antedated the emergence of humankind will last as long as humanity itself, and will surely remain, as it has been hitherto, one of the fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.

What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.

The missing link between humans and apes? It's certainly those brutes who haven't yet learned to respect privacy.

No civilization can afford to remain stagnant. Citizens of the world must steel themselves for the defining challenges of their generation. People of every nation must fight pitched battles that they can never completely win. Our attitude of either capitulating to the evil permutations of our times or fighting for humanity is our story. How we address our domestic and international responsibilities is how we define our humanness.

The religion of the future is not going to be christianity, islam, judaism or any such traditional system, rather, the religion of the future is going to be social justice.

A call to embrace democracy is the worst insult to a society that is still alien to civilisation. It is like being asked to dance to the tune of mob justice.

Madness, in which the values of another age, another art, another morality are called into question but which also reflects - blurred and disturbed, strangely compromised by one another in a common chimera - all the forms, even the most remote, of the human imagination.

Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.

Rigidity and civilization can never go together.