Civilization Quotations | Page 7

When I go biking, I am mentally far far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.

Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.

To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?

From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.

Civilization can never be sustainable.

Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.

Civilizations are not remembered by their business people, their bankers or lawyers. They're remembered by the arts.

Civilization, we shall find, like Universalism and Christianity, is anti evolutionary in its effects; it works against the laws and conditions which regulated the earlier stages of man's ascent.

Tolerance is held to be a condition of mind which is encouraged by, and is necessary for, civilization.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.