Eastern Civilization Quotes

The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress. ~ John Stuart Mill

Chinese dialectical reasoning had an impact on the physicist Niels Bohr, who was highly knowledgeable about Eastern thought. He attributed his development of quantum theory in part to the metaphysics of the East. There had been a centuries-long debate in the West about whether light consists of particles or waves. Belief in one was assumed to contradict and render impossible belief in the other. Bohr's solution was to say that light can be thought of in both ways. In quantum theory, light can be viewed either as a particle or as a wave. Just never both at the same time. ~ Richard E. Nisbett

The problem with saying "the personal is political" is twofold: You politicize what is personal ("Everyone must celebrate my lifestyle!") and you personalize the political ("Your opposition to the minimum wage hurts my feelings!").
This is how you un-think yourself out of a civilization; When politics becomes a fashion choice and fashion becomes political. If you wear your politics on your sleeve, it usually means you don't keep them in your brain where they belong. ~ Jonah Goldberg

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief. ~ Cynthia Ozick

I think that in this globalised world, the local is going to become more and more important - it is a paradox. You see it in Western Europe more and more. Eastern Europe is still coming out of the Soviet uniform cultural era, but this kind of separation and nationalism is very obvious now in Western Europe. ~ Robert Dessaix

But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists. ~ Roger Scruton

They believe civilization weakens natural selection. They do nature's work so that we do not become a soft race. The Passage, it seems, is a continuation of that policy. Only we were the tools they used. My ... victim ... was, bless his soul, a fool. He was from a family of no worth, and he had no wits, no intelligence, no ambition," he frowns at the words before sighing, "he had nothing the Board values. There is a reason he was to die."
Was there a reason Julian was to die?
Roque knows what he does because his mother is on the Board. He loathes his mother, and only then do I realize I should like him. Not only that, I take refuge in his words. He disagrees with the rules, but he follows them. It is possible. I can do the same until I have power enough to change them. ~ Pierce Brown

The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you ~ Christopher Hitchens

The sum of the whole matter is this - our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually. ~ Woodrow Wilson

The problem with water, though, is that the shortfalls don't show up until the very end. You can go on pumping unsustainably until the day you run out. Then all you have is the recharge flow, which comes from precipitation. This is not decades away, this is years away. We're already seeing huge shortages in China, where the Yellow River runs dry for part of each year. The Yellow River is the cradle of Chinese civilization. It first failed to reach the sea in 1972, and since 1985 it's run dry for part of each year. For 1997 it was dry for 226 days. ~ Lester R. Brown

'Buncha Losers' comedy is one of those homegrown American art forms, up there with infomercials and Elvis-shaped soap carvings. No other civilization could have invented it. The French took a stab with Sartre's 'No Exit,' but then they had to ruin it with a lesson at the end. ~ Rob Sheffield

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization. ~ John Keegan

The key stone of Westem civilization is the sphere of spontaneous action it secures to the individual. There have always been attempts to curb the individuais initiative, but the power of the persecutors and inquisitors has not been absolute. It could not prevent the rise of Greek philosophy and its Roman offshoot or the development of modem science and philosophy. Driven by their inborn genius, pioneers have accomplished their work in spite of ali hostility and opposition. The innovator did not have to wait for invitation or order from anybody. He could step forward of his own accord and defy traditional teachings. In the orbit of ideas the West has by and large always enjoyed the blessings of freedom.
Then came the emancipation of the individual in the field of business, an achievement of that new branch of philosophy, economics. A free hand was given to the enterprising man who knew how to enrich his fellows by improving the methods of production. A horn of plenty was poured upon the common men by the capitalistic business principie of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Volumptuous women look good. Ignorant messages from mass media tell women what size to be, but female qualities-a softness, a soothing capacity that a woman has no matter what size she happens to be-sustain the more humane aspects of civilization. ~ Stanley Crouch

The Eastern allusion bit me again. "I'll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio," I said; "so don't consider me an equivalent for one. If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the bazaars of Stamboul without delay, and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here. ~ Charlotte Bronte

I thought it went without saying that when the Soviet Union collapsed and the eastern states opened up, we would be plagued by a new kind of criminality in Sweden and Western Europe. And that is what happened. ~ Henning Mankell

A prayerless age will have but scant models of divine power. The age may be a better age than the past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an age by the force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the increase of holiness and Christlikeness by the energy of prayer. ~ E. M. Bounds

Various Eastern fathers referred to the practice of married priests in their churches, offering each one of us elements for a further careful evaluation of the choice of the Latin church to connect celibacy to ordained priesthood. ~ Angelo Scola

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility. ~ Rebecca West

If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have ... a recipe for the fall of civilization. ~ Sam Harris

To be sure, the story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for anyone not deliberately blind. The races are different. Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization-any kind of civilization-disappears. ~ Jared Taylor

They are that same group, but I've got my own rivalristic problems. Is that a word, rivalristic? I've got my own rivalristic problems in the Eastern Conference. ~ Shaquille O'Neal

Man cannot relinquish himself or the place in the visible world that belongs to him; he cannot become the slave of things, the slave of economic systems, the slave of production, the slave of his own products. A civilization purely materialistic in outline condemns man to such slavery, even if at times, no doubt, this occurs contrary to the intentions and the very premise of its pioneers. ~ Pope John Paul II

Our carbon emissions have to eventually go to zero. We have to. Otherwise we're never going to have a stable climate and that's what our goal is for human civilization to thrive, a stable climate. We don't want one that's hotter, we don't want one that's colder, we want one that's stable. ~ Katharine Hayhoe

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage. ~ Margaret Fuller

Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artists power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence. ~ Paul Klee

The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that. 135 ~ Bessie Head

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs? ~ Virginia Woolf

Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible. ~ Thomas Sowell

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness. ~ Wendell Berry

They can say that abortion is alright. They can vote to sustain gay marriage. And that will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don't know better, we are leading them astray and it's wrong. ~ Katherine Harris

At this juncture, the entire planet is locked, figuratively, in a room with the sociocultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. An individual of consummate taste and refinement, imbued with indelible grace and charm, he distracts his victims with the brilliance of his intellect, even while honing his blade. He is thus able to dine alone upon their livers, his feast invariably candlelit, accompanied by lofty music and a fine wine. Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied in order that it may be continued. So perfect is Lecter's pathology that, from the depths of his scorn for the inferiors upon whom he feeds, he advances himself as their sage and therapist, he who is incomparably endowed with the ability to explain their innermost meanings, he professes to be their savior. His success depends upon being embraced and exalted by those upon whom he preys. Ultimately, so long as Lecter is able to retain his mask of omnipotent gentility, he can never be stopped. The spirit of Hannibal Lecter is thus at the core of an expansionist European 'civilization' which has reached out to engulf the planet. ~ Ward Churchill

The year 1453, therefore, marks the end of the Roman Empire. No one can fail to be amazed by the almost constant successes of the Ottoman armies, which developed in less than two centuries from a small group of fighters who waged war around their gazi in Eastern Anatolia into a force whose power reached the shores of the Bosphorus and the palace of Justinian's successors. How ~ Andre Clot

The saying of John Peale Bishop is worth recalling, that the South excelled in two things which the French deem essential to civilization: a code of manners and a native cuisine. Both are apt to suffer when life is regarded as a means to something else. Efficiency and charm are mortal enemies, and Southern charm indubitably derives from a carelessness about the efficient aspects of life. ~ Richard M. Weaver

With a combination of proper lighting and climate control he managed to achieve a different ecological niche in each gallery. In the African section, where the imbrications of Augustine, Mafouz and Okri lay decomposing, he grew sorghum and Dioscorea yams. In the Chinese gallery where the Tao Te Ching and countless Confucian annotations moldered, he grew rice, crab apples and barley. Over the poems of Neruda and Borges himself, he grew potatoes. Each plant in this new Eden he lovingly tainted with the virus of civilization

- from the short story "Resurrection ~ Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end ... It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America. ~ Bernard DeVoto