Herbert Spencer Quotes

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development.

The stream of civilisation flows on like a river: it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals.

Men in masses do not forget the main gains of their civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations, their tendency is upward.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

We remake the world through our technologies, and these in turn remake and extend us, in ever spiraling lattices of complexity. McLuhan uncannily foresaw the future, where electronic technology would shape and expand cultures and societies into a global membrane of communications.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.

Government is on a collision course with the future

We think that a powerful and vigorous movement is impossible without differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

I don't think people change; electronics change, the things we have change, but the way we live doesn't change.

The world that we live in isn't uniform-looking, and the future that we're headed toward isn't uniform-looking.

Black women come with all sorts of personalities. So it's time for media to wise up and show us in all of our complexity.

We think we can play a small part in the evolution of culture.

Society is changing constantly, and changing faster than we think.

So when people say how horrible it is that Donald Trump is president, well, yeah, but we've faced a lot worse than this and our country went on to go from the world of 'Mad Men' to the world it is today, and that's what's going to happen now. That's what's going to happen in the next 50 years. We're going to be fine.

Always history is being made; opinions attitudes and institutions change, and there is evolution in the nature of capitalism

The bad news is that the movement toward the partnership side of the social scale (and it is always a matter of degree, as no society is a pure partnership or domination system) has been fiercely resisted and countered by periodic regressions. So domination systems have rebuilt themselves in different forms - be they secular or religious, eastern or western, leftist or rightist.

We're looking at such enormous complexity and variety that it makes a mockery of "celebrating diversity." In the L.A. of the future, no one will need to say, "Let's celebrate diversity." Diversity is going to be a fundamental part of our lives. That's what it's going to mean to be modern.