Civilizational Quotes & Sayings

Climate change is not an environmental problem. It is a civilizational problem. Climate change is not just another issue. If it is not addressed in very short order, it will swamp every other issue facing us today — Ross Gelbspan

Never trust machinery more complicated than a knife and fork. — Robert A. Heinlein

And speaking of Escher, it's worth recording this for posterity: the artists were right, literally right, all along. Beneath what we used to call 'reality' there was always an Escheresque, a Boschian, a Munchian fact - a scuttling Guernicopia of horrors just waiting to be discovered once the civilizational rock was finally overturned. — Adrian Barnes

A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure. — Ilana Mercer

Some scholars have been arguing that a civilizational clash between organized religions is the next step in human history. — Mary Douglas

I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor. — Robert Kennedy

While [European] national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism ... in order to match, balance and thus authenticate 'Western Civilization'. — Hamid Dabashi

Wherever we can multiply our forces and our civilizational efforts, absorbing other elements, no law can prohibit us from doing so, as such actions are our duty. — Roman Dmowski

You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. ... You are captives - and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it? - your captivity and the captivity of the world. — Daniel Quinn

People, like water, seek their own level. — Ann Landers

We will be remembered only if we give to our younger generation a prosperous and safe India, resulting out of economic prosperity coupled with civilizational heritage. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

The United States is very important, too important in the civilizational process of the world. It's difficult to move, to make a difference in establishments like the one the US represents. — Gilberto Gil

I am a college-educated American. In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil. I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages. Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare. The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution. I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton. My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment. Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting. Nobody did this on purpose. Nobody tried to deprive me of my civilizational patrimony. But nobody felt any obligation to present it to me and my generation in an orderly, coherent fashion. Ideas have consequences - and so does their lack. — Rod Dreher

We have progressed in a technological sense, but I'm not so sure whether we have progressed in a civilizational matter - the quality of the civilization has not improved. It's a civilization that's in love with technology but forgetting about the human side of it and the destructive tendency in human civilization has not been faced. — Laszlo Nemes

In evil times, when public virtue has left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no one cares to disturb the silence of the libraries. — Joseph-Arthur De Gobineau

Sufism is a vast and varied historical and civilizational phenomenon, touching upon poetic expression and sacred art, ethics and virtue, discipleship and spiritual guidance, humble service and spiritual practice, the nourishment of the heart and the illumination of vision. Yet all these many concerns coalesce ultimately to a single concern: that of the return to God. The way of this return is, at root, a matter of the ever-deepening inculcation of the reality of Divine Unity in one's being, as expressed in one's understanding, one's presence and attention, and ultimately one's very existence. This "Path of Unity" is none other than the central course of the entire tradition of Sufism. What — Peter Samsel

I'm glad the President finally found an economic development program. I'm just sad that it's only in Baghdad. — John F. Kerry

One foot in front of the other, more aimless than direct, Bradford left the waiting room for the outside world. Called for a taxi and then dialed Munroe again, desperate for her voice, for one ray of light in the darkness, afraid of what he might say if she did answer, afraid of himself and the inner deadening that pointed to a danger far more lethal than any rage he'd felt. — Taylor Stevens

An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world. The university, in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with comprehensive ineptitude, has become the natural habitat of the ideological enthusiast. A kind of adventure playground, carefully insulated from reality in order to prevent absent-minded professors from bumping into things as they explore transcendental realms, has become the institutional base for civilizational self-hatred. — Kenneth Minogue

Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn't an "issue" to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message - spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions - telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve. — Naomi Klein

...the spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be born as an inevitable fate; that, on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life. And our effort should not only indicate the means, but also how to employ them. No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order. — Eric Voegelin

"Playing" the resources of characterology for the sake of clarification and insight into the structures of actual existence is many times more daunting than playing a piano; it requires the thinking of chords of thoughts, not just isolated simplisms or abstracta; it demands the shaping or encompassing of morphological modes of intelligence that can comprehend gestalten, syndromes, historical and civilizational patterns in which it is not the particulars but their interactive significance (as an ensemble of actualities or principles) that is vital. — Kenny Smith

It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message - spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions - telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. — Naomi Klein

It is the American air protection, which safeguards the freedom enjoyed by the Kurdish region. It guarantees the cultural, health and civilizational progress made in Iraqi Kurdistan. — Jalal Talabani

The history of prevailing status quos shows decay and decadence infecting the opulent materialism of the Haves. The spiritual life of the Haves is a ritualistic justification of their possessions. — Saul D. Alinsky

I think the failure of The American church to affirm the goodness of civilizational life is our greatest failing today. — Greg Forster

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous. — Samuel P. Huntington