#civilization

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

‎'I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#nature #philosophy #love

Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#nature #nature

Na Natureza nunca eu descobriria um contorno feio ou repetido! Nunca duas folhas de hera, que, na verdura ou recorte, se assemelhassem! Na Cidade, pelo contrário, cada casa repete servilmente a outra casa; todas as faces reproduzem a mesma indiferença ou a mesma inquietação; as ideias têm todas o mesmo valor, o mesmo cunho, a mesma forma, como as libras; e até o que há mais pessoal e íntimo, a Ilusão, é em todos idêntica, e todos a respiram, e todos se perdem nela como no mesmo nevoeiro... A "mesmice" - eis o horror das Cidades! ↗

— Eça de Queirós

#civilization #nature #nature

It ain't technology that enhances the civilization.. but the way mankind perceives nature from all standpoints. ↗

— Toba Beta

#perception #technology #nature

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest. ↗

— Émile Zola

#civilization #organized-religion #religion #religion

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#chaos #civilization #destruction #fear #insecurity

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#civilization

The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance. ↗

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#islam #modernism #religion