Where is everybody? Humans could theoretically colonize the galaxy in a million years or so, and if they could, astronauts from older civilizations could do the same. So why haven't they come to Earth?
The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty. . . . Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys basic people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.
It's more like there are some really obvious things that are different and then lots and lots of smaller things, lots of things about who lives and who dies, civilizations that rose and fell, all the way down to individual characters. That becomes the state of where you left your galaxy. The endings have a lot more sophistication and variety in them.
Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.
It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
The sovereign state has in our times become a lethal danger to human civilization because technical developments enable it to employ an infinite number and variety of means of destruction.
Civilization is not necessary before Christianity; do both together if you will, but you will find civilization follow Christianity more easily than Christianity follow civilization.
As Gandhi famously responded when asked about "Western civilization," "I wish they had one," the same applies to "international community": "I wish there was one. "
The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.
The walking delegates of a higher civilization, who have nothing to divide, look upon the notion of property as a purely artificial creation of human society. According to these advanced philosophers, the time will come when no man shall be allowed to call anything his. The beneficent law which takes away an author's rights in his own books just at the period when old age is creeping upon him seems to me a handsome stride toward the longed-for millennium.
How a society treats its disabled is the true measure of a civilization.
Imagine what things would be like if the news media actually sided with civilization.
The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.
The evidence that at least one extraterrestrial civilization has visited Earth is extensive both in scope and detail. In its totality it comprises a body of evidence which at the very least supports the general assessment that extraterrestrial life has been detected, and that a vigorous program of research and serious diplomatic initiatives is warranted.
In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.
To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.
The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.