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Civilisation Quotes

“As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.)”

WarCourageHumourMoralityIraqResistanceAntiwarEnemiesCivilisationIraq WarWar On TerrorFathersSons
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.”

WealthHistoryUnited StatesCrimeGuiltFranceImperialismCivilisationHaitiReparationsApologiesAmerican ImperialismFrench Imperialism
Book:Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
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“Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.”

SoulCivilizationFutureTravelScience FictionCivilisationUnrestBodiesMachine
Book:The Machine Stops
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“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.”

HistoryPsychologyHuman NatureCivilisation
Book:The God of Small Things
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“Old people have wisdom but not energy; young people have energy but not wisdom; energy and wisdom must be in the same body to create a much better civilisation! To do this, we will either give energy to the old or we will give wisdom to the young and for now the latter seems a more plausible action!”

ChildrenWisdomEnergyWiseWisdom QuotesMehmet Murat Ildan QuotesTurkish LiteratureWisdom QuotationsTurkish QuotesTurkish WritersMehmet Murat Ildan QuotationsIldan Wise SayingsTurkish Wisdom WordsTurkish PlaywrightsTurkish QuotationsTurkish AuthorsIldan WisdomIldan WordsOld PeopleCivilisationOldTurkish AphorismsTurkish SayingsTurkish ThinkersYoung PeopleCivilisationsBetter Civilisation
Author:Mehmet Murat Ildan
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“The heroes cleansed our world of chthonic terrors -- earthborn monsters that endangered mankind and threatened to choke the rise of civilisation. So long as dragons, giants, centaurs and mutant beasts infested the air, earth and seas we could never spread out with confidence and transform the wild world into a place of safety for humanity. In time, even the benevolent minor deities would find themselves elbowed out by the burgeoning and newly confident human race. The nymphs, dryads, fauns, satyrs and sprites of the mountains, streams, meadows and oceans could not compete with our need and greed for land to quarry, farm and build upon. The rise of a spirit of rational enquiry and scientific understanding pushed the immortals further from us. The world was being reshaped as a home fit for mortal beings only. Today, of course, some of the rarer and more vulnerable mortal creatures that have shared the world with us are undergoing the same threats to their natural territories that cuased the end of the nymphs and woodland spirits. Habitat loss and species extinction have all happened before. The days of the gods themselves were numbered too. Prometheus's gift of fire, as Zeus had feared, would one day allow us to do even without the Olympians.”

ScienceMankindSafetyHeroesGreek MythologyGodsCivilisation
Book:Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures
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“বৃদ্ধাঙ্গুল হয়তো দেখতে সাধারণ আঙুলের মত, আসলে এটি স্রষ্টার দেয়া এক বিস্ময়কর উপহার! যদি সব আঙুল দীর্ঘ ও সোজা হতো, তবে কোনও কাজ সহজে করা বা কিছু ধরা আমাদের জন্য অসম্ভব হতো! যদি বৃদ্ধাঙ্গুল না থাকতো, তাহলে মানব সভ্যতা অনেক পিছিয়ে পড়তো!”

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Author:Md. Ziaul Haque
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“There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.”

ChristianityAtheismIslamIsraelRedemptionHonourFascismExileAmbiguityCivilisationAncestryJerusalemChristiansChristendomMuslimsAntisemitismIsraeli Palestinian ConflictJewish QuestionMosaic LawLeo StraussReligious ConversionsLaw Of ReturnNuremberg LawsIntermarriagesVictor Klemperer
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.”

WarRacismEuropeMurderIslamLondonTyrannyChristmasFascismCivilisationDetroitAnti SemitismJihadJewsSpeechesPogromsAhmed Omar Saeed SheikhDaniel PearlNorthwest Airlines Flight 253Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“परिवार समाज की, और समाज सभ्यता की पहली इकाई है, और यहाँ से ही संस्कृति पनपती है। अगर परिवार ही बेबुनियाद रिश्तों की भेंट चढ़ गये, तो समाज, सभ्यता और संस्कृति समाप्त।”

LifeCultureFamilySocietyCivilisationWay Of Life
Book:The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be!
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“परिवार समाज की, और समाज सभ्यता की पहली ईसाई है, और यहाँ से ही संस्कृति पनपती है। अगर परिवार ही बेबुनियाद रिश्तों की भेंट चढ़ गये, तो समाज, सभ्यता और संस्कृति समाप्त।”

CultureFamilySocietyCivilisationCivilizationsation
Book:The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be!
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“Girls say to me, very reasonably, 'why isn't it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?' Well, my reply is I was once a little boy - I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That's one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you - as it were - scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more ike a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don't ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I'm going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality - this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can't do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society. The other thing is - why aren't they little boys AND little girls? Well, if they'd been little boys and little girls, we being who we are, sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn't want this to be about sex. Sex is too trivial a thing to get in with a story like this, which was about the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife.”

MenChildrenSexWomenSocietyEqualityLife ExperienceCivilisationLord Of The FliesMicrocosms
Author:William Golding
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“Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this. [On British railway dining cars]”

HistoryNostalgiaCivilisationTransportDiningRailwayCatering
Book:The Railways: Nation, Network and People
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“As the sun baths the ruins in its golden glow, I gaze upon the terraces that cascade down the mountainside, seemingly suspended between heaven and earth. The stones are whispering tales of a civilisation long gone, but their voices carry on the breeze, reaching my ears with a poignant urgency. In this forgotten citadel, the ghosts of the Inca mingle with the echoes of my own restless soul.”

SunPersonal DevelopmentTwilightSoul SearchingCivilisationSouth AmericaPeruChoquequiraoInca
Book:Peruvian Days
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“Simon stopped listening. He realised he'd had enough. Enough of the theories, enough of the mystery, enough of the bullshit. Enough of the soldiers and guns and MI5. Enough of bugs in phones and in people he cared about. Enough of not being cared about back. Enough of uncertainty and lies and civilisation, collapsing or not. Enough of is part in it, his place, his role; the character of Simon Parfitt and all the baggage it entailed.”

ActionTechnologyHorrorThrillerBugsSpidersEnd Of The WorldCivilisationSoldiersBaggageFed Up
Book:Infected Connection
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“This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, 'When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.' But the serious critique of Zuma is not about who is a barbarian and who is civilised. It is about good governance, and this is a universal value, as relevant to an African village as it is to Westminster. If you are unable to keep your appetites in check, you are inevitably going to live beyond your means. And this means you are going to become vulnerable to patronage and even corruption. That is why Jacob Zuma's 'polygamy' is his achilles heel.”

PoliticsSexRacismCorruptionBritishBritainSouth AfricaSelf ControlAfricaCivilisationPolygamyPatronageGood GovernanceWestminsterSuperiority Complex2010Jacob ZumaCulture Of Africa
Author:Mark Gevisser
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“Is masturbation so harmless, though? Is it even comparatively pure and harmless? Not to my thinking. In the young, a certain amount of masturbation is inevitable, but not therefore natural. I think, there is no boy or girl who masturbates without feeling a sense of shame, anger and futility. Following the excitement comes the shame, anger, humiliation, and the sense of futility. This sense of futility and humiliation deepens as the years go on, into a suppressed rage, because of the impossibility of escape. The one thing that it seems impossible to escape from, once the habit is formed, is masturbation. It goes on and on, on into old age, in spite of marriage orlove affairs or anything else. And it always carries this secret feeling of futility and humiliation, futility and humiliation. And this is, perhaps, the deepest and most dangerous cancer of our civilisation.”

SexPornographyCivilisationMasturbation
Book:Selected essays
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“Nature,” on the original planet, had meant what was not controlled by human beings. “Nature” was what was substantially previous to control, the raw material for control, or what had escaped from control. Thus the areas of Dichew where few people lived, quadrants that were undesirably dry or cold or steep, had been called “nature,” “wilderness,” or “nature preserves.” In these areas lived the animals, which were also called “natural” or “wild.” And all the “animal” functions of the human body were therefore “natural” — eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, sex, reflex, sleep, shouting, and going off like a siren when somebody licked your clitoris.”

HumanitySexNatureHumourCivilizationColonialismCivilisation
Book:The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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“If not prevented, desertification of the world can one day make the camels as the best and the sole cars of our civilisation!”

Mehmet Murat Ildan QuotesClimate ChangeDesertTurkish LiteratureTurkish QuotesTurkish WritersMehmet Murat Ildan QuotationsIldan Wise SayingsTurkish Wisdom WordsTurkish PlaywrightsTurkish QuotationsTurkish AuthorsIldan WisdomIldan WordsCivilisationTurkish AphorismsTurkish SayingsTurkish ThinkersCamelsClimate Change QuotesClimate Change DenialCamelDesertsClimate ChangesDesertification
Author:Mehmet Murat Ildan
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“The forests were crippled, the wheat fields vanished; in place of the grass there reappeared stone and drifting sand. Men perished and moved on, the cities sank back into the sand, the dust settled over them. Thousands of years later Nordic dreamers dug up the petrified culture from the rubble and ashes. Today, the entire picture of the former paradise stands before our eyes as a spent dream which had once produced life, beauty and strength as long as a superior race ruled. It will live again and it will dream again. But as soon as races of a dreamless kind took over and attempted to realize the dream, reality vanished with the dream.”

CultureCivilisationAryanRosenberg
Book:The Myth of the Twentieth Century
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“Tracing the career of the Teuton through mediaeval and modern history, we can find no possible excuse for denying his actual biological supremacy. In widely separated localities and under widely diverse conditions, his innate racial qualities have raised him to preeminence. There is no branch of modern civilization that is not of his making. As the power of the Roman empire declined, the Teuton sent down into Italy, Gaul, and Spain the re-vivifying elements which saved those countries from complete destruction. Though now largely lost in the mixed population, the Teutons are the true founders of all the so-called Latin states. Political and social vitality had fled from the old inhabitants; the Teuton only was creative and constructive. After the native elements absorbed the Teutonic invaders, the Latin civilizations declined tremendously, so that the France, Italy, and Spain of today bear every mark of national degeneracy. In the lands whose population is mainly Teutonic, we behold a striking proof of the qualities of the race. England and Germany are the supreme empires of the world, whilst the virile virtues of the Belgians have lately been demonstrated in a manner which will live forever in song and story. Switzerland and Holland are veritable synonyms for Liberty. The Scandinavians are immortalized by the exploits of the Vikings and Normans, whose conquests over man and Nature extended from the sun-baked shores of Sicily to the glacial wastes of Greenland, even attaining our own distant Vinland across the sea. United States history is one long panegyric of the Teuton, and will continue to be such if degenerate immigration can be checked in time to preserve the primitive character of the population.”

CultureRaceHistoryImmigrationRomeCivilisationBiopoliticsDegeneracyTeutonLatins
Author:H.P. Lovecraft
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“...it is plain that the proportion of celibates was high in the Roman empire and that the fall in the fertility of marriages was going on. It is the childless marriage, the small family system that contemporary writers deplore....'The human harvest was bad,' It was bad in all classes, but the decline was most marked in the upper ranks, the most educated, the most civilized, the potential leaders of the race.”

PoliticsRaceHistoryDeclineCivilisationEugenicsFertilityChildlessnessNatalismBirthrates
Book:Medieval People
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“I thought I was getting away from politics for a while. But I now realise that the vuvuzela is to these World Cup blogs what Julius Malema is to my politics columns: a noisy, but sadly unavoidable irritant. With both Malema and the vuvuzela, their importance is far overstated. Malema: South Africa's Robert Mugabe? I think not. The vuvuzela: an archetypal symbol of 'African culture?' For African civilisation's sake, I seriously hope not. Both are getting far too much airtime than they deserve. Both have thrust themselves on to the world stage through a combination of hot air and raucous bluster. Both amuse and enervate in roughly equal measure. And both are equally harmless in and of themselves — though in Malema's case, it is the political tendency that he represents, and the right-wing interests that lie behind his diatribes that is dangerous. With the vuvu I doubt if there are such nefarious interests behind the scenes; it may upset the delicate ears of the middle classes, both here and at the BBC, but I suspect that South Africa's democracy will not be imperilled by a mass-produced plastic horn.”

CulturePoliticsAttentionDemocracyMediaCrowdsAtmosphereNationalismFascismSouth AfricaAfricaCivilisation2010Association FootballBbcRobert MugabeRight Wingers2010 Fifa World CupCulture Of AfricaAlarmismVuvuzelasCulture Of South AfricaJulius Malema
Author:Richard Calland
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“Je ne suis pas pour l'occupation d’un pays arabe par Israël, mais, en revanche, je ne veux pas remplacer Israël par une nation islamique qui s’insta1lerait sur ses ruines, et dont le seul souci serait de promouvoir une culture de mort et d’ignorance parmi ses fidèles, à une époque où nous avons désespérément besoin de ceux qui en appellent à une culture de vie et de développement, propre à cultiver l’espoir dans nos âmes. Regardons tous les pays fondés sur la pensée religieuse, regardons leurs peuples et les générations qui y grandissent; qu’offrent-ils en termes d’humanité et d’humanisme? Rien, c’est certain, sinon la peur de Dieu et l'incapacité à affronter la vie; rien d’autre. De telles pensées ont formé et continuent de former des générations inaptes à toute créativité, à toute culture, incapables même de s’inspirer des civilisations qui leur viennent d’ailleurs, puisqu’elles ne sont pas à même de construire la leur.”

ReligionCulturePalestineCivilisationHumanisme
Book:1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think
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“To save our dying earth, any government which is not environmentalist must go because on earth there are thousands of governments but there in only one earth! Continuing with the eco-traitor stupid governments means an environmental suicide! Enemies of nature are real barbarians and there is no place for these savages in our civilisation!”

EarthNatureEnvironmentMehmet Murat Ildan QuotesEnvironmentalTurkish LiteratureTurkish QuotesTurkish WritersMehmet Murat Ildan QuotationsIldan Wise SayingsTurkish Wisdom WordsTurkish PlaywrightsTurkish QuotationsTurkish AuthorsIldan WisdomIldan WordsEnvironmentalismCivilisationTraitorEarth DayEnvironmentalistTurkish AphorismsTurkish SayingsTurkish ThinkersEnvironmental ProtectionGovernmentsEnvironmental ConservationEnvironmental ProblemsEnvironmental ValuesEarth Day QuotesEarth Day QuotationsGreen PeaceEco WariorEnemies Of Nature
Author:Mehmet Murat Ildan
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