1,222 Quotes About Civilization

Breese was one of those people who thought of civilization as sitting atop the earth like a man on a throne, and not like a weed that had thrust itself up through a crack in the sidewalk.

Someday, when all your civilization and science are likewise swept away, your kind will pray for a man with a sword.

If only more people lived in cities with decent public transportation and intrinsically low carbon emissions per capita. If only more people were more civilized.

The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have -or have not- inherited the earth.

If you do not find civilization inside you, you'll never find it outside.

The anxiety specific to leisure and the Coast. Too many forms of natural beauty artificially brought together. Too many villas, too many flowers. Villegiatura, nomenklatura: the same struggle. The same artificial privilege, whether it be that of the political bureaucracy or the luxuriance of lifestyle. Nature putrefied by leisure, purged of all barbarity, sickeningly comfortable - one day perhaps this dream climate, this heatwave of luxury will explode into one last forest fire.

Once established for a few generations, civilization might seem durable enough to last forever. But the skin of enlightened self-interest is very delicate, easily eroded, and the human capacity for unspeakable barbarity lies just beneath its surface.

Since the dawn of civilization, Homo sapiens has become a self-programmable species.

At the early stage of transition to the radically superintelligent civilization, we may use the Naturalization Protocol simulations to teach AGIs our human norms and values, and ultimately interlink with them to form the globally distributed Syntellect, civilizational superintelligence.