Quotes and text excerpts about "civilization"

“ CIVILIZATION Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.
Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph. ”

“ Civilization is not a thing separate and apart, any more than art is.
Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Civilization is the expeditious way of doing things. And as haste is often waste—the more hurry the less speed—civilization is the best way of doing things. ”

“ Civilization spells economy. It means a fuller utilization of our powers, faculties, and our mental and physical equipment, no less than a more capable use of the productive forces of nature. The more primitive a society, the more immediate and absolute is its subjection to environment. From this thraldom civilization is gradually releasing us, and to-day we stand partly above our environment and in a measure mold it by determining its character, and forcing its adaptation to our peculiarities in addition to our own increasing adaptability to its changing conditions. ”

“ Civilization is an integrative process. During the course of its competitive survival struggle, potential building units of an expanding civilization are tested out and included or rejected in much the same way that a stone-mason checks and tests the individual stones of which his wall is being built. The analogy is not entirely accurate. A wall becomes a completed part of a total structure. A civilization is a process of existence from conception and birth to dissolution and death. At any point in the process there is a delicate balance between integration and disintegration. ”

“ Civilization, I say, is a mere mushroom growth, as compared with the whole life-period of man's existence on earth. It is only ten thousand years old; while, by the most modest and cautious calculation, man has existed one hundred thousand years; and during the ninety thousand which preceded the last ten, he made gigantic progress towards self-knowledge and self-reverence. Let us, therefore, not be browbeaten by civilization on account of its antiquity. ”

“ Civilization is the onward and upward movement of the human race. This fermentation of humanity is the product of many factors, and has been effected by all sorts of human activities. War, commerce, agriculture, inventions, crusades, discoveries, literature, art, religion, skepticism, government, languages, science, manufactures, climate, soil, food, and many other things have assisted in developing the mind and heart of man, and in improving his physical condition. ”

“ All civilization is merely an intense effort to make life beautiful. If life is trivial, then civilization is vanity and vexation of the spirit. What profits man to wear out body and mind in the service of civilization? Civilization has been developed on a metallic basis. Tools, implements, instruments and machinery form the landmarks of the different civilizations. The gold of Ophir, the copper of Sinai, the silver of Laurium were part of the web and woof of the early civilization. In modern times industrialism has become nearly the sum total of our civilization. ”

“ Civilization is the expression that man has made of himself in his attempts, through thought and will, to effect the conquest of Nature. This witnesses to the peculiar and magnificent place which alone belongs to him in nature. ”

“ Civilization is the result of previous progress. Progress is a movement; it is, so to speak, dynamical. Civilization is a state, it is static. It is not the work of the present moment; it is rather that which the present inherits from the past, in the way of science, art, discovery, wealth, customs. In a society which is in process of civilization, each generation finds a certain store of the elements of civilization at hand. ”

“ CIVILIZATION.—Civilization is the ocean of which the millions of individuals are the rivers and torrents. These rivers and torrents swell with those rains of money and home and fame and happiness, and then fall and run almost dry, but the ocean of civilization has gathered up all these waters, and holds them in sparkling beauty for all subsequent use. Civilization is a fertile delta made by the drifting souls of men. ”

“ The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. ”

“ There have been many definitions of civilization. Civilization is a complexity of countless aspects, and may be validly defined in a great number of relationships. A reader of James Harvey Robinson's MIND IN THE MAKING will find it very reasonable to define a civilization as a system of society-making ideas at issue with reality. Just so far as the system of ideas meets the needs and conditions of survival or is able to adapt itself to the needs and conditions of survival of the society it dominates, so far will that society continue and prosper. ”

“ Civilization is the most comprehensive, extensive and inclusive life pattern achieved by terrestrial humanity. Starting locally and following the three basic principles of urbanization, expansion and exploitation, each civilization has charted a course that led from tentative local beginnings through a cycle of growth, maturity, decline, decay and dissolution. ”

“ Civilization is a great foundling hospital, and fortunate are all those who get safely into the creche before the frost or the malaria has killed them, the wild beasts or the venomous reptiles worked out their deadly appetites and instincts upon them. ”

“ The history of civilization is the history of the growth amongst human beings of the habit of submitting their dealings with each other to the direction of rules of universal application, and their withdrawal of them from the domain of personal feeling. ”

“ The history of civilization is largely a history of man's struggle against the forces of nature and of his victory over them. Nature is always saying to man, "Thou shalt not"; and man is always replying, "I will." ”

“ Civilization does not, I think, make the race any better. It makes men know more: and if knowledge makes them happy it is useful and desirable. The one purpose of every sane human being is to be happy. No one can have any other motive than that. There is no such thing as unselfishness. We perform the most "generous" and "self-sacrificing" acts because we should be unhappy if we did not. We move on lines of least reluctance. Whatever tends to increase the beggarly sum of human happiness is worth having; nothing else has any value.
The cant of civilization fatigues. ”

“ Civilization is a slow process. It takes all the forces, moral, intellectual, educational and religious, now in successful operation, to hold the world from falling back and to move it slowly, but surely onward and upward, to a higher plane of civilization. While it is a tedious and arduous, if not an impossible task, to make a white man, in his habits and modes of life, out of an Indian, yet the descent of the white man to the modes, habits of life and appearance of an Indian, is a sadly speedy process. ”

“ Civilization is itself a social property, a common fund, a people's heritage, accumulating from one generation to another, and opening to the new-comer economic opportunities and careers incomparably better and more numerous than the ancient liberties of fishing in the stream or nutting in the forest. ”

“ CIVILIZATION A WORKING PRINCIPLE.
Further than this, civilization is not only the measure of aggregated human experiences, but it is a living 5 working principle. It is a social transition; a moving forward rather than an end attained; a developing vitality rather than a fixed entity; it is the effort or aim at refinement rather than refinement itself; it is labor with a view to improvement and not improvement consummated, although it may be and is the metre of such improvement. ”

“ For civilization, in modern phrase, is the structure of the people, representing the highest results of average modern culture. It answers any question concerning the capacity and reasonable hope and expectation of a people. ”

“ To me civilization means urbanization: the fact that there are cities. It means a formal political set-up—that there are kings or governing bodies that the people have set up. It means formal laws—rules of conduct—which the government (if not the145 people) believes are necessary. ”

“ Discoveries in Science and Art.
Civilization languishes in an atmosphere of injustice, and if the injustice is gross, as slavery, for example, and long continued, the State perishes in the social convulsion which ensues. Thus perished the nations of antiquity. Civilization depends upon the useful arts; in them it had its origin, and with them it advances. The savage, in his most primitive state, is ignorant of all the arts; the most highly civilized man is familiar with, and under obligations to, all of them. The useful arts depend upon labor. ”

“ One of the most pathetic pictures in civilization is the great army of men and women searching the world over for happiness, as though it existed in things rather than in a state of mind.
The people who have spent years and a fortune trying to find it look as hungry and as lean of contentment and all that makes life desirable as when they started out. Chasing happiness all over the world is about as silly a business as any human being ever engaged in, for it was never yet found by any pursuer. Yet happiness is the simplest thing in the world. ”

“ The progress of civilization is a long chain of countless achievements each one of which has increased man's independence. Early man perhaps did not conceive the idea of fire and then set out to produce it. ”

“ The human race has made no step whatever in civilization which has not been won by pain and distress. It wins no steps now without paying for them in sacrifices. To notice only things which are directly pertinent to our present purpose: every service which we win from nature displaces the acquired skill of the men who formerly performed the service; every such step is a gain to the race, but it imposes on some men the necessity of finding new means of livelihood, and if those men are advanced in life, this necessity may be harsh in the extreme. ”

“ Nothing beautiful can be accomplished in a crowd civilization, by the crowd for the crowd, unless the crowd is beautiful. No man who is engaged in looking under the lives about him, who wishes to face the facts of these lives as they are lived to-day, will find himself able to avoid this last and most important fact in the history of the world—the fact that, whatever it may mean, or whether it is for better or worse, the world has staked all that it is and has been, and all that it is capable of being, on the one supreme issue, "How can the crowd be made beautiful?" ”

“ Now, admitting the very just definition we have quoted above, that civilization is “the progressive improvement of society as a whole, and of each individual member of which it is composed,” it seems to us conclusive that only one perfect form of it could exist on earth, i.e. that which flourished for a short time in the Garden of Eden. Mankind in the state of innocence was ipso facto civilized, and civilized to the highest moral and intellectual degree possible to mere human creatures. ”

“ There is no sin so insinuating as refined and elegant sin, and of that civilization is the expert patron and champion. The sin that is the devil's chief stock in trade is not what is going on in Hester Street, but on the polite avenues. . . . Evangelization conducts to civilization, but civilization has no necessary bearing on evangelization; that is to say, there is in civilization no energy inherently calculated to yield gospel facts. ”

“ Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.
This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. ”

“ Nowadays robots can do just about anything, and we rejoice over how convenient and quick everything has become, and over civilization's progress, but we had better look again, because civilization is robbing us of our jobs. Whether in developed or developing countries, civilization is the enemy of human survival.
I have described one of the new conditions under which the city will self-destruct (or become uninhabited) . The city, which once achieved prosperity by means of civilization, will soon perish by means of civilization. ”

“ Seasoning green timber or men is always an experiment. A man may do very well in a simple, let us say, country or backwoods line of life, who would come to nothing in a more complicated civilization. City life is a severe trial. One man is struck with a dry-rot; another develops season-cracks; another shrinks and swells with every change of circumstance. Prosperity is said to be more trying than adversity, a theory which most people are willing to accept without trial; but few men stand the drying out of the natural sap of their greenness in the artificial heat of city life. ”

“ The most manly workers I have seen in this country are white men. They know how to obtain and use the best class of labor-saving machines, and they trust no one but themselves to manage them, for they know that superior implements and the recklessness of brute force don't work well together. Under the warm sun of the tropics white men and machinery will yet open the grandest field of civilization.'
This goes to confirm us in the opinion we have long entertained and advanced in these pages, that the result of the great political change we are now undergoing will be for the benefit of white men. ”

“ Absolute fiends are as rare as angels, perhaps rarer: ferocious savages, with occasional touches of humanity, are however very frequent: and in the wide interval which separates these from any worthy representatives of the human species, how many are the forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness, often under an outward varnish of civilization and even cultivation, living at peace with the law, maintaining a creditable appearance to all who are not under their power, yet sufficient often to make the lives of all who are so, a torment and a burthen to them! ”

“ American people are material in the making. They are not a worn-out race; they are, rather, unformed, plastic, with their life before them. Second, they inhabit perhaps the richest portion of the surface of the globe, which, so far from being exhausted, has not been heavily drawn upon in some respects. It is true that coal, that adjunct of the civilization of the industrial age, is not plentiful (except in certain districts) . But the future may not be so largely dependent upon this mineral. ”

“ All in all, good and bad considered, the general evolution does not testify to less literary talent. The issue of quality is open to controversy, as it always has been. Many books reflect a level of literacy that is not exactly encouraging. Still, literature does not fail on its merits (or lack thereof) . It fails, rather, on the context of its perception. Like anything else in the civilization of illiteracy, the multiplication of choices resulted in the annihilation of a sense of value and of effective criteria for differentiation within the continuum of writing. ”

“ Love of truth is a fundamental virtue because it is the basis of many smaller ones. It is more virtuous, also, to pursue truth on account of its own intrinsic and unqualified goodness in all respects, than for any narrow extrinsic quality, such as the personal pleasure or utility it may afford, or on account of any personal gain or loss, reward or punishment, which may result from pursuing or neglecting it. In the present imperfect state of civilization however, the great bulk of mankind unavoidably employ less noble, as well as the noblest motives, as a means of improvement. ”

“ War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is claimed by its true parents. This war has eaten its way backward through all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the infinitesimals of ordinances and statutes; through all the casuistries of divines, experts in the differential calculus of conscience and duty; until it stands revealed to all men as the natural and inevitable conflict of two incompatible forms of civilization, one or the other of which must dominate the central zone of the continent, and eventually claim the hemisphere for its development. ”