#civil

The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible. ↗

— David Wong

#eye #sight #nature

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#civilization

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum. ↗

— Jonathan Haidt

#politics #presidents #psychology #religion #religion

I will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. It is not the Constitution as I would like to have it, but as it is, that is to be defended. The Constitution will not be preserved & defended until it is enforced & obeyed in every part of every one of the United States. It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced and defended, and let the grass grow where it may. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#constitution #hour-of-peril #lincoln #respect

The role of any person in this world is to be themselves without damaging the rest. We are important as long as the rest "is". - Rossana Condoleo ↗

— Rossana Condoleo

#ethics #self-awareness #self-importance #self-improvement #social-competence

The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange--all sponsored by the Church--provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution. ↗

— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

#civilization #science #western #science

When the healthy pursuit of self-interest and self-realization turns into self-absorption, other people can lose their intrinsic value in our eyes and become mere means to the fulfillment of our needs and desires. ↗

— P.M. Forni

#narcissism #rudeness #self-realization

I oppose any attempt to grant homosexual unions the same legal privileges that civil government affords to traditional marriage and family life. ↗

— Todd Akin

#any #attempt #civil #civil government #family

Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama. ↗

— George P. Baker

#ages #back #barbarism #civilization #drama

The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society. ↗

— Paddy Ashdown

#civil #civil society #created #failure #greatest