Tao Te Ching
Civilization
According to Will Durant, "Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end." Almost completely taken for granted but in reality only a fragile interlude between ice ages, earthquakes, environmental disasters, geographical whims, war, political and economic vagaries; civilizations rise and fall while continuing in a vast, collective consciousness. A product of urban development, it remains dependent on strong rural agriculture. Requiring a commonly accepted moral code, civilizations become susceptible to rigid dogma. Requiring education and the transmission of language, skill, wisdom, and culture; it’s always subject to the corruptions of selfishness and arrogance. To quote Durant again, “Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul.”
Quotes (80)
“Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption. ”
“Kindness and good nature unite men more effectually and with greater strength than any agreements”
“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
“Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.”
“Perhaps in time the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ will be thought of as including our own.”
“When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.”
“Between the ethics of the Greeks and those of the Hindus, there exists a glaring antithesis—the Greek goal to lead a happy life, the Hindu to liberate and redeem from life altogether.”
“Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. Of that divine tear and that human smile is composed the sweetness of the present civilization.”
“Any, even unintentional, deviation from truth... keeps back civilization, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends.”
“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”
“There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.”
“From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.”
“The great enemy of civilization is the notion that society cannot prosper, unless the affairs of life are watched over and protected at nearly every turn by the state and the church.”
“‘And what does it amount to?’ said Satan, with his evil chuckle. ‘Nothing at all. You gain nothing… Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you… whom you slave for, fight for, die for… it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built.’”
“The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their own borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need o being saved.”
“Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”
“This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.”
“The spread of civilization may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.”
“What is your ‘civilization and progress‘ if its only outcome is hysteria and down going? What is ‘government and law‘ if their ripened harvests are men without sap? What are ‘religions and literatures‘ if their grandest productions are hordes of faithful slaves?”
“Civilization is a matter of imponderables, of delight in the things of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feeling. Where imponderables are the things of first importance, there is the height of civilization”
“The function of the university is… to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.”
“Reporter: Mr. Gandhi! What do you think of Western civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.”
“Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while is was recent.”
“When a civilization becomes so standardized that the individual can no longer make an imprint on it, then that civilization is dying. The 'mass mind' has taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap heap.”
“The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed.”
“Introverts are educators and promoters of culture who show and value the interior life which is painfully wanting in our civilization.”
“All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics... civilization!”
“The building of that city anew—the 'City of the gods'—is the constant task of civilization... to build on the foundations of the religion of Eternity.”
“You can't say civilization don't advance ... in every war they kill you in a new way”
“In Greece, as everywhere, once realism begins to reign, civilization declines. Thus we arrive at the realistic, magniloquent, and faithless Hellenistic era which was devoid of suprapersonal ideals... Emotions and passions run wild. The free individual loses his powers of discipline, the bridle which maintained instinct in strict balance flies from his hands..”
“In every generation, civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority.”
“Ancient civilizations were little isles in a sea of barbarism, prosperous settlements surrounded by hungry, envious and warlike hunters and herders”
“Do civilizations die? ...Homer has more readers now than in his own day and land.”
“This is the tragedy of almost every civilization—that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.”
“Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul... Mercuries of the air are binding nations and civilizations together, preserving for all what each has given to the heritage of mankind.”
“Civilization is polygenetic – as generations are moments in a family line, civilizations are units in a larger whole whose name is history.”
“Man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.”
“'Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?' asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. 'I ate civilization.'”
“When a civilization loses simplicity, it becomes increasingly full of troubles and degenerates. People become slaves of external ideas, thoughts, ambitions and social systems.”
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
“Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers.”
“This civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or 'enclosed society,' with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man.”
“Civilizations are grounded on myth [and] myths are so intimately bound to the culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.”
“if men were ever to... cease to ask unanswerable questions, they would lose... the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”
“Some, like Tolstoy, found this in the outlook of simple people, unspoiled by civilization; like Rousseau, he wished to believe that the moral universe of peasants was not unlike that of children, not distorted by the conventions and institution of civilization, which sprang from human vices”
“Because the Great Wall of China and the ancient cities in the Middle East and along the Silk Road were all made of bricks, trees disappeared from these areas and the soil died—a great deal of firewood is needed to make bricks. This destruction of nature brought about the decline of human civilization.”
“all art is propaganda... the artist is not a harmless eccentric but one who—under the guise of irrelevance—creates and reveals a new reality [while] in the value system of civilization, of compulsive survival, the artist is irrelevant.”
“If we take the world's enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.”
“I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.”
“It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.”
“It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.”
“the discovery of inertia and momentum is the greatest insight of western civilization.”
“Civilizations have been destroyed many times, and this civilization is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.”
“History will judge societies and governments — and their institutions — not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.”
“Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths, the driving force being individual material gain... a principle that will destroy itself in time by pretending that the world is an infinite garbage can.”
“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan”
“We collude with them and they with us in maintaining the great foundation of ignorance and lies on which our civilization rests.”
“Civilization progresses in a leap-frog kind of way. One country advances technology and attains dominance and power and then less advanced countries use that technology to leap-frog ahead of the the once dominant one. One example is cell phones letting ‘developing countries’ skip the infrastructure phase of land-line telephone poles and wires and move technologically ahead of countries hampered by their need to maintain the old systems while at the same time trying to bring in the new. The same dynamic plays out in psychological realms of self-image, meaningfulness, and cultural identification.”
“Civilization progresses in a leap-frog kind of way. One country advances technology and attains dominance and power and then less advanced countries use that technology to leap-frog ahead of the the once dominant one. One example is cell phones letting ‘developing countries’ skip the infrastructure phase of land-line telephone poles and wires and move technologically ahead of countries hampered by their need to maintain the old systems while at the same time trying to bring in the new. The same dynamic plays out in psychological realms of self-image, meaningfulness, and cultural identification.”
“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”
“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”
“Civilization has been a permanent dialogue between human beings and water.”
“Every society produces its own cultural conceits, a set of lies and delusions about itself that thrives in the face of all contrary evidence.”
“We all live in stories, so called grand narratives. Nation is a story. Family is a story. Religion is a story. Community is a story. We all live within and with these narratives… and need to constantly examine them… that’s the definition of any living vibrant society—constantly questioning those stories. The argument itself is freedom… that's how societies grow.”
“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”
“every single civilization including this western world, was brought into being from a sacred place to serve a sacred purpose. And when that purpose is forgotten… the fundamental balance and harmony of its existence become disrupted”
“while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behavior, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way.”
“the concept of 'civilization' is still largely reserved for societies whose defining characteristics include high-handed autocrats, imperial conquests and the use of slave labor... hierarchical ranks, governed from the top down.”
“for a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.”
“Civilizations are born from the marriage of bureaucracy and mythology. the computer-based network is a new type of bureaucracy far more powerful and relentless than any human-based bureaucracy we've seen before... The potential benefits of this network are enormous. The potential downside is the destruction of human civilization.”
“see even the Islamic State as an errant offshoot of the global culture we all share... radical Islamists have been influence by Marx and Foucault as much as by Muhammad... Islamic fundamentalism may indeed pose a radical challenge, but the 'civilization' it challenges is a global civilization rather than a uniquely Western phenomenon.”
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