Stanislaw Jerzy Lec Quotes

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

As a society, I think we express our cultural mores through our politics. We're trying constantly to figure out what's OK and what's not OK. And it's hard, because our society is constantly buffeted by gale force winds of technology. Things are always changing.

Sociology almost always dominates technology. Ideas often lie unused because people do not want to use them.

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

A nation which does not make pictures, a nation which does not make statues, a nation which does not practice science, such a nation, one must admit, has no place on the highroad of civilization. But our nation with its true qualities deserves to become and will become civilized and progressive.

Over the past thirty years Europe’s influence has transformed Cairo. Now…we are civilized.

While the association and its founders and its founders most sincerely appreciate the splendid elements and achievements of the old-time Indian culture and the methods by which early conditions were met, it realizes most keenly the inefficacy of these methods in meeting the conditions of modern times.

It was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, and hatred of progress and civilization …

Civilization and profits go hand in hand.

Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

Prejudices are the props of civilization.

The modern civilized State has been developed by the antagonism between individual and social interests, which has transformed primitive Society into Civilization.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

America…could within twenty years bring us to a degree of development which Turks, left to themselves, would not be able to achieve in a century. It would make Turkey prosperous, rich and happy and turn Turks into a strong and civilized nation.

The progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity…. we are a much better people than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilized state.

.. every advance in social progress removes us more and more from the guidance of instinct, obliging us to depend upon reason for the assurance that our habits are really agreeable to the laws of health.

What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the [Ancient] Greeks?

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found,—a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,—a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization.

The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.