Global Civilization Quotes

Small societies are particularly vulnerable to disruption of key lifelines, such as trading relations, or to large perturbations like wars or natural disasters. Larger societies, with more diverse and extensive resources, can rush aid to disaster victims. But the complexity that brings resilience may also impede adaptation and change, producing social inertia that maintains collectively destructive behavior. Consequently, large societies have difficulty adapting to slow change and remain vulnerable to problems that eat away their foundation, such as soil erosion. In contrast, small systems are adaptable to shifting baselines but are acutely vulnerable to large perturbations. But unlike the first farmer-hunter-gatherers who could move around when their soil was used up, a global civilization cannot. ~ David R. Montgomery

Over the next 20 to 30 years, we are going to end up with world government. It's inevitable ... There's going to be conflict, coercion and consensus. That's part of what will be required as we give birth to the first global civilization. ~ Jim Garrison

In modern global civilization, war is basically a symbolic war that requires a flexible mind, deep intuition, and strategic thinking. Having lost a symbolic war, no one can gain an advantage in active military operations. ~ Elmar Hussein

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe ~ Jimmy Carter

We are in an unusual predicament as a global civilization. The maximum that is politically feasible, even the maximum that is politically imaginable right now, still falls short of the minimum that is scientifically and ecologically necessary. ~ Al Gore

We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees and walk upright,and build a viable global civilization when you start with technology that is made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is a project, and progress is dificult. ~ Sam Harris

We need to evolve and articulate a global ethics for a global civilization that integrates and evolves the passionate truths of every great system of knowledge - pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. ~ Marc Gafni

I believe that, if managed well, the Fourth Industrial Revolution can bring a new cultural renaissance, which will make us feel part of something much larger than ourselves: a true global civilization. I believe the changes that will sweep through society can provide a more inclusive, sustainable and harmonious society. But it will not come easily. ~ Klaus Schwab

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. ~ Richard M. Rorty

Science is the global civilization of which I am a citizen. The spread of its democratic ethic and its unifying powers provides my faith in humanity. The astonishing depths of wonders in the universe, continuously revealed by science is my temple. The capacity of the informed human mind, liberated at last by the understanding that we are alone and thus the sole stewards of earth, is my religion. The potential of humanity to turn this planet into a paradise for future generations is my afterlife. ~ E. O. Wilson

Civilizations do fail. We have never seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has, in the past, always passed to another region of the world. But we now for the first time have a single, global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together. ~ John Brockman

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.

While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy. ~ Julian Assange

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 the very real long-term risks that threatening our global civilization. We must, at all cost, make the world population much, much happier in the deepest sense of the word. ~ Hanzi Freinacht

In the same way that banks succeeded at privatizing the profits and socializing the losses as they led the global economy to the brink of collapse, we are in danger of doing the same with the environment. Humanity has taken a huge leap in the last decades and become a planetary-scale force - we need to behave as a global civilization if we are not to face catastrophic consequences. ~ Felix Dodds

It is my belief that we need a new transnational sustaining 'myth' that can impart value and respect. It is my further belief that we are coming to see our universe and life as creative, without a directing agency. Meaning emerges with life. If this view becomes widespread, it has the promise to become the sustaining myth we need to sustain in turn an emerging global civilization. ~ Stuart Kauffman

The Penster is a capitalism lens of guiding development of the global civilization of human being; the book is coverage the tension of life. ~ Lawrence Bacow

The most important step we can take toward Mars is to make significant progress on Earth. Even modest improvements in the social, economic, and political problems that our global civilization now faces could release enormous resources, both material and human, for other goals. ~ Carl Sagan

Whether our species is capable of a final act of fusion - in which all living people achieve a shared identity as members of a single global culture and civilization - is a question that will determine the future not only of our own species but also of most forms of life on Earth. This is, in fact, the question that lies at the heart of this book. ~ Richard L. Currier

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where "the long term" is measured at least in centuries. ~ Stewart Brand

Much remains to be learned about stratospheric chemistry - and, in more general terms, about the physics and chemistry of the global atmosphere. ~ Mario J. Molina

They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. ~ Jack London

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted. ~ Victor Hugo

We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever. ~ Ray Bradbury

Political correctness is a code to silence dissent as western society is razed. The culture wars will erupt into violence, pitting those who defend western values vs. leftists, their 'allies', and the rulers who want to consign western civilization to oblivion. ~ Michael Rectenwald

There is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. ~ Richard Lindzen

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its manifestation in the writing of the 1590s and the decades which follow. The euphoria of Elizabeth's global affirmation of authority was undermined in these years by intimations of mortality: in 1590 she was 57 years old. No one could tell how much longer her golden age would last; hence, in part, Spenser's attempts to analyse and encapsulate that glory in an epic of the age. This concern about the death of a monarch who - as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen - was both symbol and totem, underscores the deeper realisation that mortality is central to life. After the Reformation, the certainties of heaven and hell were less clear, more debatable, more uncertain. ~ Ronald Carter

I've realized that everything is about relationships. I've witnessed that ultimately you can't take what you don't give because there is a master bookkeeper out there who keeps accounts balanced. This fundamental link between man, plants, and the earth has been documented since the dawn of civilization. ~ Vivian Elisabeth Glyck

We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization. ~ Carlo Rovelli

Ancient historians tell us that one of the symptoms of a declining civilization is a desexualization of the human race, with men becoming more effeminate and women becoming more masculine, not only in physical [appearance] but in their basic characters. ~ Billy Graham

We haven't even reached 0.00000001% of where we want to reach. There is so much more to do. We want to make sure that no child should ever be on the mercy of anyone else for his/her education. ~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

Things are so much global and Americanised. ~ John Malkovich

MODERN PARENTS OF TWENTY FIRST CENTURY NEEDS SPIRITUAL BRAIN WASH WITH GREAT CLASSIC LITERATURE ACROSS THE GLOBE FIRST. NATURALLY,RESULTING OUR FUTURE GLOBAL DIRECORS(INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN) WILL RE-DESGN AND RE-DRAFT LIFE DIRECTION SOFT-WARE TO UP GRADE THEIR SOULS GOD SPIRITUALITY NEXT. ~ Various

I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes. ~ Maynard James Keenan

Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.

If nothing else, an examination of the past - and of the present, for that matter - can be instructive. It shows us that there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash, and sink into the stewpot of North America.

With the rest of the bones.

No matter how you frame Native history, the one inescapable constant is that Native people in North America have lost much. We've given away a great deal, we've had a great deal taken from us, and, if we are not careful, we will continue to lose parts of ourselves - as Indians, as Cree, as Blackfoot, as Navajo, as Inuit - with each generation. But this need not happen. Native cultures aren't static. ~ Thomas King

Often times when you face such an overwhelming challenge as global climate change, it can be somewhat daunting - it's kind of like trying to lose weight, which I know something about. ~ Hillary Clinton

As we use our last reserves of petroleum and pollute our world drilling for oil in areas where an "accident" can quickly become an enormous ecological disaster; as our air becomes more and more polluted and unhealthy; as food, housing, energy, transportation, and clothing become less and less affordable; what can save the Earth and civilization? Hemp can! ~ Alan Archuleta

Instead of Gnostics, we have Existentialists and God-is-dead theologians, instead of Neo-Platonists, devotees of Zen, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and Beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal than that provided by the Amphitheatre, but only a shade and may not be so for long. ~ W. H. Auden

Christianity and Western civilization-what countless crimes have been committed in thy name! ~ Ngugi Wa Thiongo

Sadly, Princess Diana and I were just about the first divorced women to come under the global press's microscope. But I have a feeling it's a full and active club now. ~ Ivana Trump

As free citizens in a political democracy, we have a responsibility to be interested and involved in the affairs of the human community, be it at the local or the global level. ~ Paul Wellstone

Ask yourself: Am I an investor, or am I a speculator? An investor is a person who owns business and holds it forever and enjoys the returns that U.S. businesses, and to some extent global businesses, have earned since the beginning of time. Speculation is betting on price. Speculation has no place in the portfolio or the kit of the typical investor. ~ John C. Bogle

I ever will profess myself the greatest friend to those whose actions best correspond with their doctrine; which, I am sorry to say, is too seldom the case amongst those nations who pretend most to civilization. ~ J. G. Stedman

There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, "yes," in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister. ~ Saul Williams

The Italian Revolution was fought first of all to obtain the liberty and unity of the nation, and then, with that achieved, to join the freest and most advanced nations in inaugurating a new era of peace, justice, and joint cooperation in the work of civilization. ~ Ernesto Teodoro Moneta

The global equalization of wages and the exponential growth in technology has created a job-killing machine that's only going to get worse. ~ Jeff Greene

I wish my artwork could persuade millions of people to join a global conversation about sustainability. ~ Edward Burtynsky

Psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that the better educated and wealthier a nation is, the less likely its population is to believe in a higher being. The Global Index of Religion and Atheism also assessed that poverty was a key indicator of a society's tendency towards religion - so that poorer countries tend to be the most religious. The one exception to the rule? America. But in the strongly religious USA, despite the country's wealth, there's no universal healthcare, little job security, and a flimsy social welfare safety net. This means that the USA has a lot more in common with developing countries than she might like to think. ~ Helen Russell

We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time. ~ Joseph Bottum

And this is the mission of the church
not civilization, but salvation
not better laws, purer legislation, social elevation, human equality and liberty, but first, the "kingdom of God and His righteousness;" regenerated hearts, and all other things will follow. ~ Abbott Eliot Kittredge

There is no question in the fact that India has a global responsibility, and the coming "Gyan Yug" would see India play a pivotal role, using the strengths of its democracy and demographic dividend. ~ Narendra Modi

Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium.

With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency - say 400 hertz instead of 60 - might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible.

A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean the ~ Robert O. Becker

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

No greater tragedy exists in modern civilization than the aged, worn-out worker who after a life of ceaseless effort and useful productivity must look forward for his declining years to a poorhouse. A modern social consciousness demands a more humane and efficient arrangement. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal. ~ Edward Abbey

We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened. ~ Mark Twain

Several days in a row we sighted groups of metallic, saucer-shaped vehicles at great altitudes over the base Germany, 1951 and we tried to get close to them, but they were able to change direction faster than our fighters. I do believe UFOs exist and that the truly unexplained ones are from some other technically advanced civilization. ~ Gordon Cooper

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization. ~ Shirley Hazzard