It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about […]
Civilization Quotes
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.
In the advance of civilization, it is new knowledge which paves the way, and the pavement is eternal.
With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.
Those matters (politics) are of no interest to me, I know only two terms – civilization and barbarism, and I am on the side of civilization
We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge.
The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.
Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.
But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom […]
All the ways discovered so far lead to the horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another for scraps of food.
