The barbarian either totally mocks or totally worships…

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and…

— Octavio Paz

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.

— John Maynard Keynes

Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many…

— James Joyce

We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the…

— Terence McKenna

“The mission is, not to replace old world mindlessness with new world mindlessness, but to put an end to all forms of brainless authoritarianism.”

— Abhijit Naskar

Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing…

— Carl von Clausewitz

Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a…

— Carl Jung

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been…

— Ernest Hemingway

We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000…

— Julian Assange

“The voice in the head that never stops speaking becomes a civilization that is obsessed with form and therefore knows nothing of the most…

— Eckhart Tolle

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.

— Nicolas Gomez Davila

Sentiment is the mightiest force in civilization; not sentimentality, but sentiment. Women will bring this into politics. Home, sweet home, is as powerful on…

— Judith Ellen Foster

Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it…

— David Josiah Brewer