#civil

If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#patriotism #love

Be as intellectual as you like about it, but India is brilliantly mad. And if you want to love it, you have to hate it first. ↗

— Simon Dring

#madness-and-civilization #travel #love

What...?" He began as he approached her before noticing the gate was open. He took command and wished he was in uniform with his star and weapon, but at the moment he was only a highly trained civilian, and unarmed. ↗

— Judith-Victoria Douglas

#command #highly-trained #star #unarmed #uniform

[Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain? ↗

— Frank Harris

#homosexuality #punishment #sins #temptation #men

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#dissent #nature

To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself. ↗

— Dee Brown

#indians #nature #nature

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him. ↗

— Will Durant

#commanding-nature #eternal-recurrence #history #history-repeating-itself #science

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

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#civilization

The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify. ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#history #human-nature #psychology #men