Civilization 4 Technology Quotes & Sayings

It's worth remembering that all technology leaves a footprint. For example, our own technology is leaving a footprint in terms of global warming, which could be detected from a long way away. One assumes that a very advanced civilization that has been around maybe millions and millions of years would have an even bigger footprint that might extend beyond its planet to its immediate astronomical environment. — Paul Davies

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. — John Perry Barlow

Our civilization is experiencing unprecedented changes across many realms, largely due to the rapid advancement of information technology. The ability to code and understand the power of computing is crucial to success in today's hyper-connected world. — Al Gore

Rebellion against technology and civilization is real rebellion, a real attack on the values of the existing system. But the green anarchists, anarcho-primitivists, and so forth (The "GA Movement") have fallen under such heavy influence from the left that their rebellion against civilization has to great extent been neutralized. Instead of rebelling against the values of civilization, they have adopted many civilized values themselves and have constructed an imaginary picture of primitive societies that embodies these civilized values. — Theodore Kaczynski

The kind of emancipation that is being put forward today in technologically based cultures is crying out for women at last to become men. But this is not equality of rights: it is the ultimate oppression of women by a civilization in which the hegemony of technology implies the subjugation of nature and the subjugation of women
the two are closely inter-related. — Pope Benedict XVI

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where "the long term" is measured at least in centuries. — Stewart Brand

My body really, really wanted to reproduce when I was 15. It took a lot of civilization, socialization, willpower and some emulsion polymerization technology for me not to reproduce at 15. — Penn Jillette

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. — Edward O. Wilson

Triumphant science and technology are only at the threshold of man's command over sources of energy so stupendous that, if used for military purposes, they can wipe out our entire civilization. — Cordell Hull

A world remade in the image of Walt Disney, and driven by an increasingly sophisticated communications technology, is the total breakdown of civilization.20 — Morris Berman

I discovered that I was not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man; not to science, which means simply knowledge, but to science misapplied, to the worship of technique and technology, and to that perversion of science properly called scientism; and not to civilization but to culture. — Edward Abbey

Above all, what is our culture, and what has remained of it? Is European culture perhaps nothing more than the technology and trade civilization that has marched triumphantly across the planet? Or is it instead a post-European culture born on the ruins of the ancient European cultures?
There is a paradoxical synchrony in these developments. The victory of the post-European techno-secular world and the universalization of its lifestyle and thinking have spread the impression (especially in Asia and Africa) that Europe's value system, culture, and faith (in other words, the very foundations of its identity) have reached the end of the road and have indeed already disappeared. — Pope Benedict XVI

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology. — Clifford D. Simak

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things. — Muhammad Yunus

The inventors of tools enhance civilization,
but the author of ideas enables them to invent. — Toba Beta

There's always a prevailing mystique in any civilization," Leto said. "It builds itself as a barrier against change, and that always leaves future generations unprepared for the universe's treachery. All mystiques are the same in building these barriers - the religious mystique, the hero-leader mystique, the messiah mystique, the mystique of science/technology, and the mystique of nature itself. We live in an Imperium which such a mystique has shaped, and now that Imperium is falling apart because most people don't distinguish between mystique and their universe. You see, the mystique is like demon possession; it tends to take over the consciousness, becoming all things to the observer. — Frank Herbert

The civilized man is technologically ahead of - intellectually behind - his time. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Our civilization is shifting from science and technology to rhetoric and litigation. — Mason Cooley

It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy. — Isaac Asimov

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. Ralph Waldo Emerson — H.W. Brands

Civilization, comprising all the achievements of art and science, technology and industry, is the result of man's invention and manipulation of symbols - of words, letters, numbers, formulas and concepts, and of such social institutions as universally accepted clocks and rulers, scales and timetables, schedules and laws. By these means, we measure, predict, and control the behavior of the human and natural worlds - and with such startling apparent success that the trick goes to our heads. All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is. — Alan W. Watts

Militant atheists seek to discredit religion based on a highly selective reading of history. There was a time not long ago - just a couple of centuries - when the Western world was saturated by religion. Militant atheists are quick to attribute many of the most unfortunate aspects of history to religion, yet rarely concede the immense debt that civilization owes to various monotheist religions, which created some of the world's greatest literature, art, and architecture; led the movement to abolish slavery; and fostered the development of science and technology. One should not invalidate these achievements merely because they were developed for religious purposes. If much of science was originally a religious endeavor, does that mean science is not valuable? Is religiously motivated charity not genuine? Is art any less beautiful because it was created to express devotion to God? To regret religion is to regret our civilization and its achievements. — Bruce Sheiman

(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

There is a danger, when thinking of the earliest civilized people, of putting too much emphasis on technology. One tends to assume that if you don't have, at least, a lavatory and perhaps something that will take you a lot faster than your own feet, or a certain number of gadgets in the house, then you must be in some way, a bit backward and defective ... the important thing to remember is that technology is not necessarily the same thing as civilization. — Jacquetta Hawkes

A point to remember. As any technology advances, its methods and equipment do not become more complex; they become simplified. (Take, for example, printed circuits, silicon chips.) Such equipment may not be recognizable to a civilization of inferior knowledge. The point is we may be looking at objects - quite exciting objects - without recognizing them. Who would have expected that items in Baghdad Museum, long labelled as "ritual objects," would prove to be components of batteries? Do you see what I mean? — Jonathan Gray

We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. — Carl Sagan

Based on the experience of history and civilization of mankind, which is more important for Muslims today, to no longer busy discussing the greatness that Muslims achieved in the past, or debating who first discovered the number zero, including the number one, two, three and so on, as the contribution of Muslims in the writing of numbers in this modern era and the foundation and development of civilizations throughout the world. But how Muslims will regained the lead and control of science and technology, leading back and become a leader in the world of science and civilization, because it represents a real achievement. — Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie

Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable. — H.W. Brands

Everywhere in the world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization. — Jacques Maritain

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization. — Ariel Durant