CIVILIZATION
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Our
society must make it right and possible for old people
not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for
the test of a civilization is the way that it cares
for its helpless members.
-- Pearl
S. Buck
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In
his scientific genius, man has wrought material miracles
and has transformed his world. He has harnassed nature
and has developed great civilizations. But he has never
learned very well how to live with himself. The values
he has created have been predominantly materialistic;
his spiritual values have lagged far behind. He has
demonstrated little spiritual genius and has made little
progress toward the realization of human brotherhood.
In the contemporary atomic age, this could prove man's
fatal weakness.
-- Ralph
J. Bunche |
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The
degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering
its prisons.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The
family is the nucleus of civilization.
-- Ariel and Will Durant
Education
is the transmission of civilization.
-- Will Durant
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"only
world law can assure progress towards a civilized
peaceful community."
-- Albert
Einstein
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"The
world no longer has a choice between force and law;
if civilization is to survive, it must choose the
rule of law."
-- Dwight
D. Eisenhower
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" A
civilization built on dualism and war within and between
persons, one that puts its most creative minds and
its best engineers to sadistic work building more
and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at
all. It needs a radical transformation from the heart
outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just
as in the last century it outlawed slavery. The human
race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows it yet."
-- Matthew
Fox "
...our
civilization, so addicted to knowledge, has fled from
wisdom. Knowledge is very, very powerful. If it is
not tempered and contoured by greater visions, like
justice, compassion, beauty, grace and thinking of
the next generation and seven generations to come
-- then indeed, it is dangerous. Unfortunately, many
of our educational systems in the West are still very
dangerous places." -- Matthew
Fox
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"The
making of peace is a continuing process that must go on
from day to day,
from year to year, so long as our civilization shall last."
-- J. William Fulbright
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Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to
move millions of people. Since the very birth of human
civilization, people have moved to settle close to
it. People move when there is too little of it. People
move when there is too much of it. People journey
down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People
fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every
day, need it.
-- Mikhail
Gorbachev
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"While
the farmer holds the title to the land, actually,
it belongs to all the people because civilization
itself rests upon the soil."
~ Thomas
Jefferson
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Tolerance
is held to be a condition of mind which is encouraged
by, and is necessary for, civilization.
-- Arthur Keith
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"What
we are fighting for is not just the fishes and the
birds. We protect nature not for nature's sake but
for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of
our communities, and if we want to meet the obligations
of our civilization and our culture which are to create
communities for our children that provide them with
the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment
as the communities that our parents gave us, we've
got to start by protecting that infrastructure; the
air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the
landscapes that enrich us. We're not protecting nature
for nature's sake. We're protecting it because it
enriches us, yes, it enriches our economy and we ignore
that at our peril. But it is also enriching us aesthetically,
recreationally, culturally, historically and spiritually.
Human beings have other appetites besides money. And
if we don't feed them, we're not going to grow up…we're
not going to become the kind of beings that our creator
intended us to become."
~ Robert
Kennedy, Jr.
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Internationalism
is a community theory of society which is founded
on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains
that respect for a healthy development of human society
and of world civilization requires that mankind be
organized internationally. Nationalities should form
the constitutive links in a great world alliance,
and must be guaranteed an independent life in the
realm of the spiritual and for locally delimited tasks,
while economic and political objectives must be guided
internationally in a spirit of peaceful cooperation
for the promotion of mankind's common interests. --
Christian
Lange
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Civilization
has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved
and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas
of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for
monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization,
as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily
bill of fare will consist only of this one item.
-- Claude Levi-Strauss
The
great question is, can war be outlawed from the world?
If so, it would mark the greatest advance in civilization
since the Sermon on the Mount.
-- Douglas MacArthur
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We
must construct a new set of values and attitudes to
replace the culture of war which, for centuries, has
been influencing the course of civilization. Winning
peace means the triumph of our pledge to establish,
on a democratic basis, a new social framework of tolerance
and generosity from which no one will feel excluded.
-- Federico
Mayor |
No festival
of martial glory or warrior's renown is this; no pageant
pomp of war-like conquest, no glory of fratricidal strife
attend this day. It is dedicated to peace, civilization
and the triumphs of industry. It is a demonstration of fraternity
and the harbinger of a better age--a more chivalrous time,
when labor shall be best honored and well rewarded.
-- Peter J. McGuire, Father of Labor Day
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What
little wilderness remains displays the patterns we
must return to, if our species and as many others
as now remain are to persist here a while. Ideally
this would call for a broad cultural rapprochment
with the wild, a long overdue armistice in civilization’s
war upon it.
~ Stephanie
Mills
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War
is a damnable, filthy thing and has destroyed civilization
after civilization
-- Philip
Noel-Baker |
Only
in a free society do individuals have the best chance to
seek virtue, strive for excellence, improve their economic
well-being, and achieve personal happiness... The worthy
goals of civilization can only be achieved by freedom loving
individuals. When government uses force, liberty is sacrificed
and the goals are lost. It is freedom that is the source
of all creative energy.
-- Ron Paul
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"Our
idea of what constitutes social good has advanced
with the procession of the ages, from those desperate
times when just to keep body and soul together was
an achievement, to the great present when "good"
includes an agreeable, stable civilization accessible
to all, the opportunity of each to develop his particular
genius and the privilege of mutual usefulness."
-- Frances
Perkins
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"Fairness
is an efficiency parameter if we look at the whole global
civilization. It is not an efficient way of meeting
human needs if one billion people starve while another
billion have excess. It would be more efficient to distribute
resources so that at least vital needs were met everywhere.
Otherwise, for example, if kids are starving somewhere,
dad goes out to slash and burn the rain forest to feed
them -- and so would I if my kids were dying. And this
kind of destruction is everyone's problem, because we
live in the same ecosphere."
-- Karl-Henrik
Robert |
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"If
civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science
of human relationships - the ability of all peoples,
of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at
peace."
-- Franklin
D.Roosevelt |
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We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial
elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
-- Carl
Sagan
It
is now almost 40 years since the invention of nuclear
weapons. We have not yet experienced a global thermonuclear
war -- although on more than one occasion we have
come tremulously close. I do not think our luck can
hold forever. Men and machines are fallible, as recent
events remind us. Fools and madmen do exist, and sometimes
rise to power. Concentrating always on the near future,
we have ignored the long-term consequences of our
actions. We have placed our civilization and our species
in jeopardy. Fortunately, it is not yet too late.
We can safeguard the planetary civilization and the
human family if we so choose. There is no more important
or more urgent issue. -- Carl
Sagan
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"The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological,
evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis
because the most central and important aspect of globalization-its
economy-is currently being organized in a manner that
so gravely violates the fundamental principles by
which healthy living systems are organized that it
threatens the demise of our whole civilization.
-- Elisabet
Sahtouris
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Our
civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism.
An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of
individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular
imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest
and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on
the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas
that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't
-- John Ralston Saul
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Civilization can only revive when there shall come
into being in a number of individuals a new tone of
mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds,
and in opposition to it -- a tone of mind which will
gradually win influence over the collective one, and
in the end determine its character. Only an ethical
movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical
comes into existence only in individuals.
-- Albert
Schweitzer
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But
once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to
be quintessentially Western have also flourished in
other civilizations, we also see that these ideas
are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed.
We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this
ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in
the world. -- Amartya
Sen
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Security,
the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where
the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs
over everyone's head
-- George
Bernard Shaw
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"Our
expanding ethnic diversity of this century, a time
when we will all be minorities, offers us an invitation
to create a larger memory of who we are as Americans
and to re-affirm our founding principle of equality.
Let's put aside fears of the "disuniting of America"
and warnings of the "clash of civilizations." As Langston
Hughes sang, "Let America be America, where equality
is in the air we breathe."
-- Ronald
Takaki
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