Civilization Impact Quotes

Death has always been the first sign of European civilization when introduced in the Pacific.

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Civilization does everything for the mind and favors it entirely at the expense of the body.

I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization.

All preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians have failed. It seems now to be an established fact that they cannot live in contact with a civilized community and prosper.

The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization.

I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization. Their rights invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world; and they at last sunk into the earth, and the ploughshare turning the sod over their graves, and I have flown to their rescue--not of their lives or of their race (for they are "doomed" and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes, at which the acquisitive world may hurl their poison and every besom of destruction, and trample them down and crush them to death

Lying under an acacia tree with the sound of the dawn around me, I realized more clearly the facts that man should never overlook: that the construction of an airplane, for instance, is simple when compared [with] a bird; that airplanes depend on an advanced civilization, and that were civilization is most advanced, few birds exist. I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it.

Taken over the centuries, scientific ideas have exerted a force on our civilization fully as great as the more tangible practical applications of scientific research.

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

When not protected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, [birds] yield very readily to the influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon by man.

What 'Deadwood' did was to talk about how capitalism started, how civilised society came in, and how that brought its own problems.

Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

'Business,' properly understood, is so central to every aspect of our civilization that Republicans should proudly announce that they are indeed 'the party of business.'

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

Modern civilization has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise.

Morocco as it is is a very fine place spoiled by civilization.

The superiority of the Arab civilization, especially in Spain and Sicily, was the chief agency which awakened Europe after six centuries of barbarism.

Civilization has taught us to eat with a fork, but even now if nobody is around we use our fingers.

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.