Classical Civilization Quotes

Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity - famine, earthquake, and plague - led to mass conversions, another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions. ~ Hans Zinsser

Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection. ~ Lucio Russo

Culture dictated from above is the enemy of folk music. Whether it's stuffy classical music or pre-engineered pop where somebody's paid tons of money to make sure that everyone hears this song a certain number of times a day - that feels like the opposite of folk music. ~ Will Sheff

Whatever oppressions man has suffered, they have invariably fallen more heavily on woman. Whatever new liberties advancing civilization has brought to man, ever the smallest measure has been accorded to woman, as a result of church teaching. The effect of this is seen in every department of life. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound - as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued - a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it - the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe - that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross. ~ Tom Holland

Civilization is a social plague on the planet, and vices are just as necessary to it as is a virus to disease. ~ Charles Fourier

In classical music, love is based on bitin'
imitation. It's not based on interpretation. A jazz musician, if he plays someone else's song, has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement. ~ Todd Boyd

Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we've ever known - an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.
"In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the "heavenly breezes" Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot.
But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die - in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.
I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless ~ Maria Popova

Guidebooks used to write the name of my city in two ways: Gjirokaster in Albanian, and Argyrokastron for foreigners. The classical-sounding name somehow gave it better credentials, because people in the Balkans famously exaggerate and often call their villages cities. ~ Ismail Kadare

Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the "avant-garde" - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored. ~ Mircea Eliade

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

There are certain things for which civilization has no answer. But if you choose to meddle thus, then you must be prepared to facethe consequences, whatever they are. ~ Jimmy Sangster

Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks - a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece. ~ Tom Standage

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. ~ Karl Marx

Indeed I have begun in this fashion, and place great importance on this opening chapter, for unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows unconvincing and paradoxical. ~ Julian Jaynes

It was Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest and professor, who earned the title of father of international law. ~ Thomas E. Woods Jr.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

I started the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979. The idea of bringing Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism into the mainstream of medicine was tantamount to the Visigoths being at the gates about to tear down the citadel of Western civilization. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

My father is doing a radio program - classical music. He has a beautiful speaking voice and that's his passion in life, his music. My mother lives in Melbourne and is an avid photographer. She's also started writing for a magazine out there and she submits poems, very funny ones, and articles. In some way or other, my family is always doing something with the media. ~ Olivia Newton-John

Our non-co-operation is with the system the English have established in India, with the material civilization and its attendant greed and exploitation of the weak. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture. ~ Antonio Tabucchi

You're mad, you missionaries,' ejaculated Tai Haruru angrily. 'What good do you think you do, crawling out to the extremities of all the different world's ends and dying there like lizards spiked on sticks?'
Brother Balaam jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the church behind him. 'Ye'll get no civilization worth havin' in a new country unless ye lay down a few martyrs' bones for a foundation,' he said. 'They generate. Slow but sure. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant. ~ Oswald Spengler

On horseback you feel as if you're moving in time to classical music; a camel seems to progress to the beat of a drum played by a drunk. ~ Walter Moers

Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've
got none to spend. That's our civilization and our education: bring up
the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money
gives out. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Can you name a single one of the great fundamental and original intellectual achievements which have raise man in the scale of civilization that may be credited to the Anglo-Saxon? The art of letters, of poetry, of music, of sculpture, of painting, of the drama, of architecture; the science of mathematics, of astronomy, of philosophy, of logic, of physics, of chemistry, the use of the metals and principles of mechanics, were all invented or discovered by darker and what we now call inferior races and nations. ~ James Weldon Johnson

There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates , who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Riding a motorcycle is a tribute, a tip of the helmet as it were, to our rugged ancestors who challenge us through the dust of centuries, proof that we have succumbed to the safety nets of civilization. ~ Foster Kinn

From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to find out order in the chaotic world surrounding them. It has however never been easy to find a solution to explain a given system while being a part of that system. The best bet is to find out the most fundamental components within the system and building a theory round these. In other words, a theory that is able to describe the world in totality has to keep the number of basic postulates it depends upon to zero or near zero. ~ Subhajit Ganguly

Because our civilization is woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas which any one group accepts will be found to contain numerous contradictions. ~ Margaret Mead

I believe in courtesy. It is the way we avoid hurting people's feelings. She thought that maybe, just maybe, western civilization was in decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock. ~ E.L. Konigsburg