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1 " If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself? "
― Richard Wright , The Outsider
2 " But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers. "
― Lewis Hyde ,
3 " We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. "
― Carl Sagan
4 " People in this civilization are starving in the middle of plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge. "
― Idries Shah
5 " We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. "
― Chris Hedges , Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
6 " Take a step back to recall the story that this book tells, and consider how it might come to a very unhappy ending. Imagine the history our disappointed descendants might write. For centuries, the moral teachings of a civilization held self—interest and self-trust to be the sins of frail and deluded humanity. These traditional teachings denied that societies could discern distinct and viable principles of order and design their own institutions accordingly. The denounced such efforts as doomed hubris. Then, in an unprecedented experiment, some people rejected the old wisdom. They took the heart’s desire and the body’s appetite as compass points and rededicated human ingenuity to serving them. They created new forms of order to house these inverted values. For a time, the experiment succeeded, changing life so dramatically that the utopian visions of one century became the pedestrian common sense of the next.Then, suddenly and drastically, the experiment failed. Self-interest and self-trust proved to be formulas for devastating the world. Democratic polities, the other moral center of the great experiment, could not stop runaway self-destruction and turned out to abet it instead. Faced with overwhelming evidence that they were on an unsustainable course, the freedom-loving peoples of the twenty-first century wrung their hands, congratulated themselves on their hybrid cars and locally grown food, and changed little, because it never made sense for anyone or any country to do so. "
― Jedediah Purdy , A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom
7 " Perhaps that is the greatest crime of conquest--that a civilization is denied the right to evolve beyond its own embarrassment. "
― Neal Shusterman , Downsiders (Downsiders, #1)
8 " So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold. "
― Steven Pinker , The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
9 " Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day. "
― Henry Beston , The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
10 " Yes, I’m talking about a non-violent revolution of consciousness. A consciousness that is able to understand how we’re all inextricably connected to each other on this Earth,and to the Earth itself.And that if we violate those fundamental principles, we do so at our own peril. Yes, we can continue to live in this delusion and the denials of reality because it’s painful, it’s frightening. Sometimes, it’s terrifying. It's terrifying to face the truth.So I ask each of you to search your hearts, as to what your truth is, for being a citizen of the Earth,promoting justice as a foundation for peace.It’s not going to happen magically, it’s not going to happen by relying on these political structures and institutions.I think we’re going to have to wage peace in the most extraordinary ways whether our government wants it or not.Without a non-violent revolution of consciousness, we will not survive as a civilization or as a planet.We can choose to have peace if we want to pay the price. And what more glorious goal than peace for all people?...To build a new society, a society that understands that we are not worth more, and they are not worth less.And that we will be willing to pay the price and take the risks to wage peace with all fellow and sister human beings. "
11 " Morality and righteousness is based on intent, love, and in giving; yet, how is it that we as humans have come to view the act of sex with a different set of arbitrary laws? Specifically pigeonholed as an act between man and women, and with righteousness based on an unsystematic number of people we have slept with; as a civilization we have come to bind society with a set of laws largely advantageous to a specific sex, with the minority heavily antagonized and chastised. The universe knows not what sexual morality is, only what is right and wrong. The same principles that dictate morals also command the virtues of sex. Is it with the right intent? Is it based on love? Is it based on giving? "
12 " I've often heard people say, “Your country is beautiful, a virtual paradise.” When will the people of Indonesia be as beautiful as their land, with a civilization and culture that contributes to the greater beauty of humankind and no longer smothers and strangles the mind? "
― Pramoedya Ananta Toer
13 " How are we ever going to understand what happens when a civilization comes apart at the seams, as it did in Germany, if we fail to see the most glaring distinctions, such as the gender gap? "
― Ruth Klüger , Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
14 " Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do." The sign read:" Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion." " It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, " that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane. "
15 " The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature.The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in " material" but in " spiritual" things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature.Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the " age of the atom bomb. "
16 " It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy—and that's a big “IF”—then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory. "
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17 " So much learning," one of my Jesuit teachers has said, " so little wisdom." To put it another way, a civilization does become more technologically skilled and more learned about science, and perhaps even a little smarter as well, when it is permitted to grow for hundreds of years and spread itself from pole to pole; but we also have more tools to turn out as badly as our ancestors said we might. "
18 " Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid, and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease! "
― W.E.B. Du Bois , W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader
19 " The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people "
20 " We do not need to explain how the Aryans entered and settled in the Dravidian country (tira¯vit»a na¯» t»u), and subjugated and oppressed the Dravidians. Nor do we need to explain how before the Aryans entered the Dravidian country, the Dravidian country had a civilization and arts of the highest rank. "
― Periyār