In yielding we are like the water, by nature placid, conforming to the hollow of the smallest hand; in time, shaping even the mountains to its will. Thus we keep duty and honor. We cherish clan and civilization. We are Chinese.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.
If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it. To a public of millions, she brought the central insight of cultural anthropology: that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity. She mastered her discipline, but she also transcended it. Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn.
Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.
Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph
Internationalism is a community theory of society which is founded on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains that respect for a healthy development of human society and of world civilization requires that mankind be organized internationally.
Our non-co-operation is with the system the English have established in India, with the material civilization and its attendant greed and exploitation of the weak.
It is difficult to generalize about Islam. To begin with, the word itself is commonly used with two related but distinct meanings, as the equivalents both of Christianity, and Christendom. In the one sense, it denotes a religion, as system of beliefs and worship; in the other, the civilization that grew up and flourished under the aegis of that religion. The word Islam thus denotes more than fourteen centuries of history, a billion and a third people, and a religious and cultural tradition of enormous diversity.
Which is superior, the Constitution or Sharia law? In Sharia law by their teachings is superior to everything else, it replaces everything else, it replaces the Constitution itself. So, you can`t be assimilated into the American civilization and accept Sharia law as being superior to our Constitution. It`s antithetical to Americanism.
From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.
Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.
For all of higher civilization's recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family.
The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!
The downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places.
But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked.
Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.
From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.