#civil

Directly in front of me, crossing the street, I saw a woman laughing and walking arm in arm with two men. When she came to the curb, she lifted her skirt with both hands and vulgarly displayed a pair of indigo stockings. ↗

— Nancy B. Brewer

#historical-romance-fiction #men

It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves. ↗

— Jerry Spinelli

#life #nonconformity #sleep #life

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks. ↗

— Beryl Markham

#civilization #nature #wild-herds #nature

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#nature #nature

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose. ↗

— Dag Hammarskjöld

#humans #nature #nature

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization. ↗

— Robert Anton Wilson

#behavior #bible #civilization #describes #god

I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer? ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#fight-for #live-for #religion #sun #music

Neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion. -quoting John Locke's argument. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#religion #religion

There is in every village a torch - the teacher: and an extinguisher - the clergyman. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#good #madness-and-civilization #religion #religion

A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs. ↗

— Gustave Le Bon

#crowds #decline #indifference #the-masses #respect