#civilization

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps. ↗

— Havelock Ellis

#doubt #height #intellectual #means #nervous

The Message of Mohammad is not a set of metaphysical phenomena. It is a complete civilization. ↗

— W.A.R. Gibb

#atheist #christian #civilization #complete #earth

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power. ↗

— Henry George

#civilization #destroyed #distribution #every #power

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities. ↗

— Roger Zelazny

#culture #war #art

Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark. ↗

— Theodore Parker

#been #cities #civilization #dark #heat

Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes the milder form of rivalry which is the motive force of the great portion of the serious labors of mankind. ↗

— Holly Estil Cunningham

#instinct #philosophy #psychology #violence #art

The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as "humanistic" ethics, has resulted in our "cut flower culture." Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality. ↗

— Will Herberg

#faith #judaism #religion #secularism #western-civilization

[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand. ↗

— Daniel Quinn

#community #family #philosophy #family

The old school of thought would have you believe that you'd be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn't what being in nature is all about. Rather, it's about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization—not bringing them with us. ↗

— Ryel Kestenbaum

#barriers #burden #civilization #distractions #freedom

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos. ↗

— Edward Bellamy

#chaos #civilization #imagination