Western civilization Quote by Jonathan Kirsch

We find personal success and great, if not enduring, influence on the outer fashioning of the world allotted to the violent, the passionate individual…

— Richard Wagner

The instinct of self-preservation in human society, acting almost subconsciously, as do all drives in the human mind, is rebelling against the constantly refined…

— Bertha von Suttner

The individual is denuded of everything but appetites, desires, and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process…

— Jeremy Seabrook

Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.

— Ernest Becker

“When we consider further the social and psychological roots of the collective urge to kill the world, we are likely to see more of…

— Robert Jay Lifton

“People are hurt and afraid at a subtle psychological level—and are therefore self-absorbed, incapable of taking on larger perspectives and incapable of acting upon…

— Hanzi Freinacht

“We must resist impulses to attack people, their credibility or their nature, and focus only on sharing our own positive creations, contributions, ideas and…

— Bryant McGill

“Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface.”

— John Steinbeck

“... a society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.”

— Dan Simmons

Society expects man to be a passive social animal who believes like the People of the Field in "Jurgen" that "to do what you…

— Abraham Myerson

Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of…

— Arundhati Roy

“Edgar Allan Poe called it “the imp of the perverse,” that willful, self-destructive voice within that impels us to do things or say things…

— Jack Cashill